Minor modifications to Wordpress theme

This is my first attempt to outsource online. So I am feeling my way through it.

Firstly I am aware that PPH is a primarily British entity, and I am British, from Surrey, although currently living in Connecticut USA. I obviously still have British accounts and can pay in £ or $.

I have purchased this theme (amongst others) http://themeforest.net/item/anan-for-photography-creative-portfolio/174507?ref=soland1234 and the support seems to be abysmal.

I have visual basic and html/css experience but not, as yet sufficient knowledge of PHP and wordpress. I have made a few modifications to the CSS, but I need for the time being just a few minor PHP modifications to the theme, as follows:

1. Where post headers are displayed in sidebar the theme does not display thumbnails of the images included in the main post. I want to enable that. (It should already do that - see live demo of the theme)
2. Having applied categories to posts I want to be able to segregate the posts into different pages. In otherwords a "blog" page for new images, another for activity blog and another for technical blog. I can create the individual page templates to apply to the given pages, but I do not seem to be able to utilise the get_category_ID function properly (if indeed that is what i should be doing). Possibly just a syntax or context issue.
3. I have a text based sub menu added to my menu item "Galleries". However, I may want to use one specific gallery page as the submenu so that clicking on images on that gallery page will hyperlink to other gallery pages instead of enlarging the image.
4. In the event of para 3 above, I would also need to display the title or caption under the thumbnail. Currently captions are not displayed on gallery pages and the title can only be displayed under an enlarged image
5. The theme admin setting allows for a logo to appear in the landing page which uses "supersized" plugin. However, I have applied a static page as home, but would like the option to "get" the logo and to apply it to the right of content pages as it does in the original "supersized" landing page.

Not that this increases the work load, but I would like the modifications commented with an agreed term I can use to search and identify at a later date. This is so I can a: understand why and where I failed to grasp how it worked, and b: so that I can reverse the changes if necessary.

I have a localhost development environment, and debugging tools to help reverse engineer the theme, and I intend to try and pick up the principles of php in time. But in the meantime I would like to get these mods made in shorter time than I am currently able to do.

I have not quoted a budget but I believe these mods should be very minor for someone with good php experience. (I am sure someone will tell me if that is not the case).