Can I assign categories to a page?

Hi all,

I have a wordpress photoblog with quite a few photo posts. I would like to add some ‘instructional’ type posts to the blog but I don’t want them to show up at all in my image categories or in the loop when people look back through my photos.

My solution to this was going to be writing these ‘posts’ as pages rather than true posts, but I still want to assign the new pages to categories. Is there any way that I can modify my theme or any plugins that will let me do this?

Many thanks in advance for any suggestions.