excluding a directory with chown, chmod

does anyone know how to exclude a directory with chown or chmod?

im trying to do something like this

      	chown $username:$username $directory/*
	chown $username:$username $directory/.*
        chown $username:$username $directory

and

  
	find $directory/* -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;
        find $directory/* -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
        find $directory/.* -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;
        find $directory/.* -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;

i want to skip over $directory/albums which has a lot of files and it will take too long to run on there
$directory/ is like /home/user/public_html/gallery

i need something that runs fast because its being applied to a lot of files

thanks!

I didn't test the command, but it should be something like that.