Last year’s International Photography Competition at the Fraser Gallery set a high bar. This year’s exhibit doesn’t reach those heights, but for a collection of images largely produced by amateurs, it’s still impressive. Donald Seymour and Richard Weiblinger offer surrealist, outrageously colorful takes on traditional flower photography, while Jill James’ “Lounging Amidst the Aspens” features a stirring blend of gold leaves and blue sky. Adrian Davis (left)and James Oberthaler offer evocative black-and-white images, the former an understated house and tree on a hill, the latter a 3×4 matrix of figures rushing to catch a train. Philip Kohn reverses tonalities for a seashore image, leaving the sun a blackish-blue, comet-like blob; Bruce McKaig superimposes bric-a-brac into an empty room, concisely suggesting the ghosts of history. But the most striking image is Van Chu’s “Mushrooms and Trees No. 2,” for which the artist dropped colored liquid into water, photographed its vaporous tendrils, then flipped the image upside down, creating a mesmerizing, wide-angle, almost arboreal landscape.

THE EXHIBIT IS ON VIEW 11:30 A.M. TO 6 P.M. TUESDAY TO SATURDAY THROUGH MARCH 5 AT THE FRASER GALLERY, 7700 WISCONSIN AVE., SUITE E, BETHESDA. FREE. (301) 718-965.