HTML or Flash....?

Attention all my photographer / Artist / and design savvy friends: I have been playing around with different options for my new website (which will hopefully launch shortly) and I am running into so many different opinions about the benefits and the drawbacks of Flash versus HTML. As a photographer, I MUST have a user friendly, but beautiful website to showcase my most recent work(s). That being said mine is in desperate need of an overhaul. I want to post tons of big beautiful photos, with a clean, modern, and yet eye catching website. The problem that I keep running into is that many artists / photographers are transitioning away from Flash based web pages, in favor of HTML, or HTML 5 (which many browsers still do not support yet). Flash looks amazing, but isn't supported by some search engines, like GOOGLE (or at least it didn't used to be... have not checked in a few months), and let's face it... if you cannot be found online, you might as well not even have a website. The other part of my problem is that I am not a web developer. I know just enough to get by, but not enough to fully create this amazing site that I have in my head... (yeah... I have encountered this type of problem before). Visions of grandeur. Anyway, if anyone is reading this and can give a little insight, that would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.