"Rochester is the image city of the world," says Sally Wood Winslow, education, program, and fine-art director of The Center at High Falls. The center's call for submissions for the annual "A Photographer's Path" show gets a response that supports that: dozens of local photographers submit every year. Now it its 13th edition, more than 300 submissions poured in, but the gallery accepted the fewest images it ever has - about half of them - although all the artists who submitted are represented. The gallery receives a "stronger positive reaction from viewers and visitors and artists" when it's not so crowded, says Winslow. The show does have a more impressively spaced and selective feel than it has in the past, with groupings cleverly chosen to emphasize theme, contrast, or color.

Even with the smaller number of images, with more than 100 artists, "something for every taste" is offered, says Winslow. I found this to be true - the requisite blend of nature, portrait, architecture, travel, and abstract imagery can be found on the Center at High Falls' walls through the end of April.

Whether in Rochester or far beyond, many snappers worshipped nature with their lenses. Margaret Miyake's "View from a Tea House, Happo-en Garden, Tokyo" provides a glimpse of fiery Japanese maples, a pond, and greenery from within a dark room, a trio of windows framing the outdoors like a triptych painting.

A sunset sweeps over a field where every blade of grass is visible in Alex Pendleton's "Fire in the Sky," which is contrasted with the nearby "Spirit Dance" by Angela Possemato, which has distilled the motion of tall, sinewy plant life, making ribbons of pale flame out of the shifting grasses. The wavy texture in Patricia Overmoyer's "Spring Ice" resembles a milky watercolor, but is a photo of a scrap of frozen water mid-melt, freeing a few stirring air bubbles and a mass of yellowing grass trapped within.

When exiting the elevator, peek right and you'll be accosted by two of Dewey Fladd's neon works. The swirling circus-y lights of a small Ferris wheel are phosphorescent in the fading twilight, and a sense of magic is imbued into the mundane scene, where the motion of the lights sets off the stillness of the field.

A side room off the main gallery features the ever-so-slightly haunting work by Wendy Sacks, whose "Portrait as Art" series, "Girl with Rose" and "Arielle," shows two barely pubescent girls dressed in lacey-gauzy clothes and lying in water, loosely clutching flowers with poetically limp limbs, their hair fanning out around their round faces in watery halos. The passivity in their delicate faces, the ultra-feminine themes, and their watery repose reminded me of a Victorian Ophelia.

The 50 or so top photographs were chosen by a jury of eight local experts and placed in the gallery's expansion, a separate room off the main space at left when you exit the elevator. I like to think of it as the "enchanted room," due to its high number of breathtaking, otherworldly images. Within, you will find the cautious gaze of a single red fox in a snowy field in Dick Thomas' "Nations Road Snow." Behind the creature, the boundary of the dark woods is indefinite, the world blurred out by the confetti of soft flakes filling the air.

Chet Scerra's captivating "Gabriella" is an intense, close portrait of a small girl's stormy expression, and situated on the same wall as another of Wendy Sacks' haunted-girl images, entitled "Ballerina."

I've never been further west than Ohio, but some of the images give a glimpse of a worthy trip. "Moonrise over the Palouse" by Chris Kogut shows off a mammoth, glowing lunar sphere looming low and rosy over an undulating hilly terrain. Ed Welch's "Mesa Arch, Canyonlands National Park" gives a peek at rocky land framed above and below by vibrantly sunlit stone.

More wonders of nature are showcased in the silvery "Lone Pine" by Mario Errico, where sunrays shine through the tree's cone shape, throwing an imposing shadow toward the viewer. Even in the darkest shade, minute details of delicate plants covering the ground remain crisp. To contrast, "Forest Impression" by Angela Possemato would be convincing if labeled as a pastel painting, with its soft vertical flow a forest.

Ursula Heudepohls "Irazú Crater, Costa Rica" contains a pool of sulfur-green water at the bottom of a deep black ravine, with mist drifting above to a scrap of pale sky. Rust, white, and blue are the primary colors in "Paint Cans as Found by Legal Wall" by Rory Gillett, which features dead cans discarded amid concrete, twigs, and detritus.

Artists often rely on midnight hues to gain an appropriate depth in shadows, but Joan Krauser schools us on how to pull maximum richness from dark sepia tones in "Portal #6," an abstract box shape. The strange shift from shadow to bright white bends geometry's rules and creates seemingly impossible spaces. A sharp beacon of light emanates from within the box, but with the opening mysteriously angled away and the source hidden, it makes moths of the viewers.

A Photographer's Path 13

Through April 30

The Center at High Falls Gallery, 60 Browns Race

325-2030, centerathighfalls.org

Wed-Fri 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Sat noon-6 p.m., Sun 1-5 p.m.