The problem with blog however is they are not geared towards hosting pictures (lots of pictures).
That's really not true. I'll just talk a bit about the one I've recently been moving to and become familiar with: WordPress
WordPress has LOTS of templates for photography-geared blogs/web sites, and starts you off with 3 GB of hosting space for free. That's pretty hard to beat, and adequate for most users' needs, even photographers with lots of photos to post and display.
Like most blog sites, you can change the look and feel of your WordPress blog/site at will with a couple of clicks any time you want or, if you know some CSS and HTML, you can build your own template from scratch. I'd venture to say there are more templates for WordPress than for any other platform on the planet at present. That's pretty hard to beat too.
If you actually run out of that 3 GB they give you for free, you can upgrade to a hosted plan for like $20 per year and get 10 GB. If that's not enough, you can step up to 25 GB for $50 per year, and so on. If you need unlimited amounts, it's easy to get a host like BlueHost for about $6-$7 per month for truly unlimited space.
If you've been building your site up for some time, actually hit the 3 GB wall and want to go unlimited with an outside host, it's a pretty simple matter of porting your WordPress site over to that new host. BlueHost will even pay for a domain name of your choice (subject to availability, of course) as a signing bonus for a year, then it's regular domain name fees after that, which is dirt cheap also.
Definitely worth checking out.