The building block of most sites is a portfolio!
I just created more custom theme page templates for the up coming VW Pro WordPress theme releases.
These are for portfolios or basically anything you want in this type of layout.
They are page templates that you can assign a category to and create endless portfolio type pages..
Horizontal Layout
Vertical Layout
As you can see in the vertical layout, the text is automatically converted to an excerpt and shrunk so the layout is even in size.
In both layouts the images are automatically cropped and linked via FancyBox jQuery light box effect animated popup display of the full size image as seen here when clicking on the images posted.
The images are inserted in the post via the custom post options in the post editor included with VW Pro Themes.