Deciding how to manage my photography blog/gallery is not easy, however I think I may have found a theme that will do it all.

The theme is Portfolium by WPShower. The theme provides a capability to add and manage a portfolio set of pages. This is independent of Posts and Pages.

The setup I will use is:

•  Main landing page is the blog page. Each blog entry will contain a group of photos from an event, which will then be assigned to categories and tagged. There will be one drop-down menu for the category structure.
  All the images on the blog will be managed by NextGen gallery.
• There will be the customary About and Contact pages listed on the top menu.
• The portfolio part of the site (which is integrated into the theme) will be handled by the theme.  Apparently the Portfolio pages are nothing more then a different “type” of posts, so changing themes doesn’t destroy them. Once switched back to Porfolium, everything is back.