I’ve done another version at muskokastyle.com/test1/alternative-home-page-2/ with Overlay Style 2 where I made two different lists to see if I could control this better. It’s slightly better – I added the CSS which helped, but still hasn’t solved the crop problem in the second row. (landscape oriented photos are still getting cropped top and bottom, not just on the sides, and I still can’t get complete control over the height of the images in the second row. I can’t figure out how to target them…)
.wpsp-overlay.wpsp-ov-style-two .wp-show-posts-image, .wpsp-overlay.wpsp-ov-style-two .wp-show-posts-image img {
min-height: 200px;
max-height: 400px;
}