Theme development

I've just installed Drupal and CivicSpace on my company's website. I want to create a Drupal theme that matches the design of the main website reasonable closely, but I'm still a rookie at PHP coding. Are there any experienced theme developers out there who would be interested in creating a theme under contract? For your reference, our website is http://www.riverbendpictures.com ; the website currently uses a HTML/CSS template.

I'm using a fixed-width phptemplate based theme which breaks completely if an image is viewed in original size.
Is there a way to have a completely different theme/layout if and only if a user views an image in original size?

I can code PHP, but I have no idea where to start (i.e. identify pages where the engine should apply a different theme).

How do I add different forum topic icons, like new and hot? Right now I have two topics in my test forum that are new but the class is the same .icon, so all the icons are the same irrelevant to their status. I've added the icon as a background image, but I can't seem to get how to differentiate with CSS between the new, hot and old topics. I'm using php template in case it's important. Do I have to use a special php.tpl for this? i checked the source of this forum and it seems to give a different image from php to the different status of topics. so, it's not done from css. i'm puzzled.

Is there any way to define theme-specific form fields? For example to customize certain icons the theme uses?

I imagine something like a settings.php file in the template folder which implements the following functions:
[themename]_settings() defines the additional settings names.
[themename]_settings_form() displays additional settings fields.

In my continued effort to make forums look as different as possible from other node/comment pairs, I was wondering if anyone had suggestions on how to alternate the class for a series of comments.

I think node.tpl.php has something like $node_count - I'm looking for something equivilent for comments if such a thing exists.

Objective is to have alternating background colors for a series of forum comments.

i'm trying to make my own theme out from the bluemarine theme.

i've disabled showing post information for pages, which is working with the bluemarine theme.
but not so in my own theme, there it is displayed!

this is strange, because i've just copied the bluemarine theme to a new directory and at the moment i've not done any changes to the template, except some css.

i'm afraid, i can't see why?
could somebody explain it to me?
thanks..