{{page.excerpt}} does not work if first element is not <p>

From Posts | Jekyll • Simple, blog-aware, static sites :

Each post automatically takes the first block of text, from the beginning of the content to the first occurrence of excerpt_separator, and sets it as the post.excerpt.

So, I suppose that after your image there is a excerpt_separator, and then it stops there. Maybe it works if you define your own excerpt_separator, maybe a </p> ?