yeah, I tried making them smaller. whatever gets put in as the ‘featured image’ automatically goes to full width (now 70% with that css, thanks).
If you look at the home page again, all those images were put in at different sizes- a couple were big, like 1300px or so width, and the other two were pretty small around 400 & 600 pixels.
In fact, the one of the vase I had to crop short because the original pic at 400 x 500px was taking up the entire screen. so, for things like that it would be nice to have more control, but I can deal with it this way for now, thanks so much for your help :O)