Hi Patrick, splashscreens are an interesting issue, no doubt about that!
I'm by no means a young web designer, but have been consulting for companies in the US from here in Australia for the past six years or so, mainly in the areas of web design, application development and usability.
The reality is that most sites loose the bulk of their visitors at their first page, a few visitors make it to a second page, fewer to a third etc. A splash screen might seem cool to a designer and were all the rage a few years ago, but it adds no value to your site, and infact gaurantees that fewer people will ever get to see any of your online images.
The first page a user sees needs to contain useful/tempting information and site navigation - your splash page contains neither. It says 'Patrick Garner The Images' but I can't even see any of your images on your home page.. only Patrick Garner. In my book it's a wasted page load, and a site can't afford to waste any, esp the first page.
If you do keep the splashscreen it should at least be changed so that either the whole image is clickable, or the 'Enter' is visible without scrolling to people running 800x600 which it currently isn't - the user needs to scroll down to see it and click into your site. (The latest stats I saw still suggested ~50% users were running 800x600 believe it or not)
The site is nicely designed though, no arguments from me there... don't take my word on any of this stuff though - there are many usability articles etc online that discuss this type of thing -
www.useit.com is probably a good a place to start as any.
pete