I would think a page rank of 3 for a small site such as yours is actually quite good. As you are hosting in the US, I do not think your NZ location would really be a factor. You might do somewhat better if you used more descriptive terms in your image attributes (alt & title).

When you rollover an image, Internet Explorer will display the "alt" attribute text, while Firefox will more properly display the text in the "title" attribute of the img tag. Search engines look at the text in these attributes when guaging the pages content. You are using rather generic text such as "click to enlarge","family photo" and "poolside" as alt attributes while not including title attributes at all. As search engines can not view the actual image, using descriptive text allows them to "see" the image. So look at the image text attributes as an opportunity to enhance your content.

I guess it is worth mentioning that browsers designed for the visually impaired will also benefit from proper use of text descriptions. In fact visually impaired is a good description of a search engine.

To phrase it differently, if an image has a title property, both IE and Firefox will display it. If the image has no title property, IE will display the alt instead, if it has one. Firefox displays nothing. Thus IE does a better job of using the available information to display something descriptive when the circumstances aren't perfect. 

The image will be the most usable for the most people (and search engines) if you have both a title and an alt property, even if they are the same and seem redundant.

Unless you are selling links on your site or blog posts PageRank matters very little.  The real thing you should be concerned about is where your site comes up in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). 

In other words, if someone types in keywords that are related to your site in the search engine (Google in this case), will they find your site?  The higher your position in the SERPs, the more likely that they will click on your link in the search engine results page.  Most people don't go more than two pages in and usually just what comes up on the first 5 listings on the first page of the SERP. 

If you are doing your SEO (search engine optimization) well then you will come up very high on the SERP.

The big factors, as you may know, is:

Backlinks from related sites, especially sites that rank highly for your keywords

Good content - keep your content fresh, updated frequently, and with plenty of keywords.

A site that is easy to crawl for the search engine spiders, preferably using non-dynamic url's. 

Most importantly, a site that is easy to navigate for your visitors. 

You best bet is to focus on content and building links from related sites.