Am I selecting the right theme?

I’m BRAND NEW to WordPress and massively ignorant – so I apologize for my ignorance in advance ’cause these are likely to be really rudimentary questions (and yes, I’ve read the where to start thing – it was long on features and one line descriptions but very short on “how to” – and watched videos and searched on the Internet).

I want to put together a simple photography image/portfolio/gallery website. I DON’T want or need blogging, posts, comments, or any of that. It’s strictly for people to get on, view images, see prices, and contact me to order:
Image banner across the top
Series of buttons/icons/links/whatever below that to jump to secondary pages – “Home”, “About”, “Contact”, Prices”
Below that I want a series of icons/buttons/images/whatever that a user can click on to drill down and eventually view a gallery
On the home page images (with embedded text) with “Nature”, “Landscapes”, “Events” for example. User clicks “Nature” and jumps to a page with images (again, with embedded text) for “Wildlife”, “Birds”, “Butterflies”, etc.
User clicks “Birds” and jumps to a page with “Water Birds”, “Song Birds”, “Raptors”, etc.
User clicks “Raptors” and they jump to a gallery page with thumbnails of all the raptor images on the left and a large image displayed on the right side. With easy navigation around the thumbnails and large images…

SO FAR, I’ve gotten ProtoPress installed, created a banner image and got an About page and Contact page to be children of my home page. So far I HAVEN’T been able to figure out how to move the menu (Home, About, Contact) down BELOW my banner – it currently obscures the middle of my header image.
I also can’t figure out how to actually put the images in either the “square boxes” or the “image grid” and to then make them be clickable for user navigation…
So, is this the right theme? If not, can someone recommend one that’ll do what I’m trying to do (which seems like it should be trivial, but maybe I’m wrong)?
If it IS a good theme for this, can someone tell me, in a clear, simple, idiot-proof way, how to do the images on the home page for users to drill down?