Designing a photography portfolio website Drupal theme - could use your help

[peachz]

Hi guys,

I'm hobbyist/semi-pro website developer and I'm currently working on designing a photo portfolio design (not for myself). I've browsed around the web to see what kind of templates/themes are available and I did not like most of them, particularly because many of them distract from the photos.

I think it's important to create an engaging design that does not distract from the photos, without looking dull or cheap.

I've talked with my photographer friends (one of which is featured on the site) and got some input from them but I need some more advice from pro photographers so I prepared some questions:

-What kind of frontpage layout would you prefer, big teaser images or a grid of small thumbnails?
-How many photos would you include in a portfolio website (if you would have one). Like 100, or 1000, or 25?
-What kind of features would you expect from a portfolio website?

-Do you know any examples of photography portoflio websites that you like? (links would be awesome!)

If you would like to discuss this with me I can take the input and think about it in the design and development process... and I would be very thankful for it!

You can see what I've got so far over here:

Justin Zuure | FJ Photography

A cool little detail: If you hover the sidebar thumbnails you get a popup box that has a glow that automatically takes the dominant color of the photo. This was very hard to achieve because other programmers just used the average colors, which gave strange results in photos with contrasting colors (orange+green gives average purple etc.) - and a better system needed to be developed