Firebug. Darn that's a good Firefox plugin.
Anyway, using Firebug, I inspected your CSS. Your applied the above CSS to your #main div as you stated, which will cause anything in that DIV to become transparent, as it will be inherited by classes below it.
I didn't see any additional references to opacity in the imagethumb, img, or image tags, so that would lead me to why it's inheriting the css from #main. You could try 100 opacity for each of the image CSS selectors to see if that doesn't correct your issue.
I'm assuming you want everything slightly transparent with the exception of images and thumbs right?