I just installed the development version of the monotone theme over on my mindfulseeing.com photoblog. What a cool theme. It adapts the colours of the post page based on the colour palette used in the first image on a post. AND, it provides a great archives page with thumbnails from each post. Very cool. This is exactly what I've been looking for in a photoblog theme.
Because it's not an officially released theme (yet) you have to check it out via the subversion repository, but that's a pretty simple call to svn co http://svn.automattic.com/wpcom-themes/monotone/
Here's a snapshot of the post page, with background colour pulled automagically from the photograph:
And, the archives page with date selector:
Thanks to Weblog Tools Collection for the tip, and Automattic for creating the theme!
Update: The monotone theme uses a function called image_scrape() which does some cool stuff for the post display on the web, but had the nasty side effect of yanking images from the RSS feed. I fixed my copy of functions.php to avoid the problem, and allow full images in the feed. Here is my trivial modification to the image_scrape() function:
// remove image tag from post_content for display
function image_scrape($entry) {
// don't scrape the image for the feed
if (is_feed()) { return $entry; }
//remove image tag
$entry = preg_replace('/![]()
]*src=(\"|\').+?(\1)[^>]*\/*>/','', $entry); /* */
//remove any empty tags left by the scrape.
$entry = str_replace('
', '', $entry);
$entry = preg_replace( '|< ([a-z]+)[^>]*>\s*|i', '', $entry );
$entry = preg_replace( '|< ([a-z]+)[^>]*>\s*|i', '', $entry );
$entry = preg_replace( '|< ([a-z]+)[^>]*>\s*|i', '', $entry );
return $entry;
}