I still have a few minor issues to work out, but it’s close enough to push live.
Both single photo and gallery posts now feature a full window hero photo. I am using backstrech to aid in sizing, flexslider for the gallery back-end. Credit also goes to kristarella.com who has posts with very helpful code for display of exif data in WordPress.
The link below will take you to a photo gallery I created to randomly feed pictures to the intro page (which i just took down to redesign). They are all pictures I have taken through the years.