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Wispy clouds in a gray sky race over an ancient Greek temple. Oblong forms of rolled aluminum are subtly illuminated in shades of blue and purple. Both can be seen in two current exhibits: the former in the Gaithersburg Camera Club's "In, Out and About" at the Activity Center at Bohrer Park, the latter in the solo show of Craig Kraft's light sculpture at Osuna Art in Bethesda.

Indeed, there are worlds between these exhibits, but light links them — light as form and as image. Kraft's aluminum and neon works are pure form reflected and illuminated in bright, colored light. Photography is all about light, but the best work in the club's juried show are those where the manipulation of light and special effects are most important.

Kraft has been working in the D.C. metro area since the mid-1970s. For about 20 years, he was known for partial body casts in bonded copper and other materials, often attached to canvases like bas-reliefs. Around 1980, he discovered the means to illuminate these organic forms by using neon tubing from hidden sources inside them. Since then, Kraft has been exploring the potential of neon as a sculptural medium, aware of other American artists working with light, such as Bruce Nauman and Dan Flavin, but always remaining distinct in his approach. In Kraft's work of the past decade, colored light affects the space around the works as much as its forms. The artist, much like his predecessors, is seeking to exploit the medium of light as both tangible and intangible, communicating both its materiality and its transparency in fully abstract forms. Yet, the flexibility of Kraft's neon tubes allows him to work in a variety of shapes, not necessarily tied to the wall, as in this exhibit's free-standing "Light Drawing."

Perhaps best known for his oversized outdoor works (two in downtown Silver Spring), Kraft is still very much connected to the "hand" in his work — regardless of size. For example, the maquette of the rolled aluminum architecture of "Vivace," his outdoor work in progress celebrating jazz music for a new library in the District, shows it will be painted so that its effect is as colorful during the day as at night when the neon tubes are illuminated. Asked why he wanted to work on this large scale, Kraft said it was an opportunity to "draw on a building," making clear his understanding of the connection between his neon tubing and drawing with a pencil.

In his most recent work, Kraft is, as he says, literally "drawing with light" in complex patterns of bent glass tubing the artist laboriously makes himself. Among the show's most impressive works are his new pieces titled "Unintentional Drawings." These dense works are literal translations into glass tubing and white argon gas of areas of pages of doodled words and forms the artist makes while talking on the phone or listening to music. As in other works, the color varies — only because of the bending of the tubes — looking white, royal and icy blue in different parts. The most impressive and largest is "Unintentional Drawing 1." Set in a Lucite box, the back of this intricate and stunning work is revealed with all the transformers and electric wires necessary to illuminate an object like this, on this scale, all of which Kraft personally oversees and controls. Both smaller works of this kind, and his more linear abstractions, such as "Drawing Fusion," show the connection between drawing and Kraft's particularly painterly attitude toward working with the neon medium. Of course, in translating quick pencil marks into glass neon tubes, Kraft slows the process, and transforms the writing from opaque graphite to shining light.

Of the 60 photographs selected by juror M. Loewe, academic dean of the Washington School of Photography, from the more than 400 entries submitted by Gaithersburg Camera Club members, a few were exceptionally interesting. Although a number of nature photos were remarkable within that genre, the more artistic creations, particularly those that employed the kind of special effects only possible with computer manipulation, were the most compelling. Among these were the two works by Ming Liu. Her "Face Off" is a striking photo with a sort of surreal commentary about identity embedded in its imagery. Her "Church Reflections," showing a Gothic church façade reflected in a sharply modern glass window from an unusual perspective, is probably the most exciting composition in the exhibit, from a purely formal point of view. I also very much liked Russell Willard's photo of the Greek ruins at Selinunte, where the temple is seen in an oddly colorless meadow of flowers. Judy Manesh's "Hotel Reflection," shot at Niagara Falls, was printed upside down and backwards. Images were combined to create a simultaneous view of the hotel and its reflections in sidewalk puddles. The effects in Larry Dean's photos of "Balloons over Cappadoccia" and "Hong Kong at Night" are similar, with hot colors that look strangely artificial and are thus reminiscent of the kind of coloration often seen in dream sequences of certain movies. Finally, Thomas Sullivan's "No. 15 Pulling Out" is visually captivating, with the half-seen train engine slowly emerging from the smoke and mist of the scene.