Yes, there is a great example of the first part of your question (opening an existing and placing it in a CWIMAQ.Images collection) located in the shipping examles for NI-Vision. If Vision is installed in the default location on your system it will be located here:
C:\Program Files\National Instruments\Vision\Examples\MSVB\2. Functions\Color Pattern Matching.
Once you have loaded the image, to the collection you can use the CWIMAQImage.ImageToArray method to convert the image to an array.
Hope this helps.
S. Arves S.
National Instruments
Applications Engineer