Question: What are the experiences in building a photo oriented site in EE?

There are some really nice plugins out there, like Channel Images or Assets, but they are all oriented around "uploading as you go" and not for serving images from some kind of back-end (like slideshowpro director or similar).
For myself and fellow photographers the input would be extremly useful around how others might have solved this.

Answer: 
Can you start by quantifying some numbers, I've built a few image/gallery'esque sites over time and it all comes down to the numbers.

The most used method is similar to a designers portfolio, one channel entry per shoot/location/project, 1 - 20 images per entry - matrix + assets - Add all the jquery/plugin magic you want because your dealing with specific entries.

If you're talking 100's of images per "entry" then mega-upload and channel images could be a worthy alternative.

In the end, it all comes down to how you want to present and how many images are in each presentation.

So, let us know how you plan to present the info with some objective numbers and a solution will become more obvious :)
All ended up with me using a totally separate application for images, Koken, with added styling similar to the main site.