Making center column at least as long as left sidebar?

I have a problem with the div and css stuff on my wordpress site.

I have a repeating picture on the left of the center column, and when the center column content is very short, then the picture does not repeat all the way to the bottom and looks very stupid.

Here is an example of such a page:

http://www.notesonphotography.com/picture-of-the-week/picture-of-the-week-10-1

Is it possible to change something so that the center column is always at least as long as the left sidebar?

 

You can't really force a height unless you know the content inside is not going to change and you can't force your center column to always be as tall as your sidebar unless you put you're sidebar inside your center column and let it expand the height of the center column..
However, since you have both your sidebar and center column already wrapped in a div you can just move your background image from your center column to your wrapper div.
Find the line of code in your css that looks like this:

div#blog #blog_center {
background: url(images/film.png) repeat-y left top;
float:left;
padding-left:0;
padding-top:10px;
width:685px;
}

Code (markup):

Remove the background property from here, then add it to :

div#page #blog {
background:#FFFFFF url(images/film.png) repeat-y 272px top;
float:left;
width:100%;
}

Code (markup):

Note that the left position had to be changed from left to 272px to match the width of your sidebar.

Now your repeating background image will always match the height of sidebar or center column whichever is taller because it is assigned to the wrapping div which will always expand to the correct height.

 

Thanks a lot, very very helpful.

I put it in and it works!