Cameron Bahnsons’s photographs may be balm for a blustery January.

The island artist’s summer landscapes light up the Bainbridge Arts and Crafts walls in “Weather,” a group exhibit with images, crafts and sculpture on all matters meteorological.

Bahnson’s expanses of treeless hills and cultivated fields are stark but not empty; the simplicity of her images of rolling hills in Eastern Washington and the Dakotas serves to stage and frame the drama of storm and sun.

“I’ve learned that weather isn’t a deterrent to taking interesting photographs,” Bahnson said. “In fact, it can elevate an ordinary scene.”

Several photographs feature both fair weather and foul; the contrast of a backdrop of storm clouds makes sunlit fields in the foreground glow as if illuminated by an internal source.

Bahnson sharpened her visual acuity in a decade of work as a designer and art director before admiration for the photographers she worked with prompted her to pick up a camera.

“It was a wonder what they could do,” she said, “just the precision of their ability to see and edit, their keen eye.”

Bahnson’s eye, trained through her commercial work, hones in on salient details, like the fold of fabric that has caught the wind in “Breeze, Corsica.”

In more complex compositions like the architecture of “Sicilian Coast,” she unerringly selects large forms to serve as the armature supporting the picture’s smaller components.

Bahnson may also strike out in the opposite direction, simplifying landscape to geometric form.

“Highwires” depicts a landscape dominated by the diagonals of a foreground of brick-red soil, with overhead utility wires echoing the compositional thrust.

Even the circular tractor ruts inscribed on a distant field of yellow wheat serve the composition, foreshortened to directional arrows that move the viewer’s eye through the work.

Bahnson took that photograph, and the others in the exhibit, with a Canon EOS using Fujichrome Provia 100 or Velvia 50 film.

Images were printed digitally, but were not manipulated.

“I’m being faithful to the photographic slide,” Bahnson said, “I wanted fidelity to what I saw.”

Bahnson emphasizes that she is more interested in questions of perception than in photography per se.

Having mastered design elements that apply to every media, she now penetrates surfaces to bring viewers a vision of “connections between the self and the environment.”

“The act of seeing art in the environment can transform the ordinary into a vehicle,” she said, “which links us to the subtleties, the stillness and the power within a moment, helping us to realize that every moment is art.”

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High winds, calm seas, storm and sun distinguish a group exhibit of two and three-dimensional fine art and craft works on the theme “Weather,” Jan. 9 through Feb. 18 at Bainbridge Arts and Crafts. An artists’ reception opens the show 6-8 p.m. Jan. 9 – an evening that also features receptions for new exhibits at Gallery Fraga, Roby/King Galleries and Art Soup. Information: 842-3132.