Some observations:

• Like the unobtrusive, but very functional search function that is always there.
• It was very slow to load home page (see below)
• The searches were very fast. Why would the searches be fast and the home page so slow?
• There's no way to unselect the "Keyword" select when you decide to use the "Description" search. Maybe there should be a "nothing" choice at the top.
• You used frames :( people won't be able to book mark. since you're using cgi, you could accomplish much the same thing with header/footer functions

Overall, a very nice effort for three months of Perl experience.

You may want to check out photo.net

Update:Selected "biking" from the keyword list but there were no matches. Typing a search term and getting no results is not a surprise. Selecting from a list of keywords you provide should yield some hits.

Update(2):Try this page for overall sight diagnostics. Ironically, this page has a javascript error which you'll see if your browser has debuggin turned on.