Yes, I've been self building computers for years and it's always my
first choice :-) Having said that, given the ridiculous prices of Hard
Drives I think a pre-built one would be my choice until things get on
an even keel again ( could be February 2012 ). My supplier has base
systems with huge Hard Drives in for half the price of the bare drive
itself - crazy !!!

For photo editing the current on-board graphics cards are up to the
task and the main thing is to throw in as much RAM as you can. 8Gb of
DDR3 RAM isn't overly expensive - and of course that means a 64bit OS
but even that's not an issue these days.