Sometime back in 2006, for reasons too numerous to outline in this post, I had become fed up with managing the site I had and began looking for an alternative. I had set up movabletype for a friend of mine, and had spent a small amount of time playing around with the system to see if it would be suitable for my needs. One of my main requirements was a photo gallery which had the same back-end feel as the rest of the site, so my search began and ended very shortly afterwards with the discovery of Doug Bowman's excellent Photo Gallery Templates.
And this is where to start! Download Doug's templates, install them, and then lock yourself away for a week and pour over every aspect of how they work. I like to think of them as a crash course in movabletype templating and the use of plugins. I certainly learned a lot from them.
So where to next? Well, thats really up to you and google, but I can point you to a few more of my favourite movable type help sites.