This site was last modified on September 28, 2003 and is now being maintained at eachnewday.com

Christian and Hopeful Pass the River

Albert College is a private school in Belleville, Ontario, slightly west of where Highway 62 crosses the Bay of Quinte into Prince Edward County.  It is a magnificent structure of great stone blocks, sitting well back from Dundas Street on a large, well maintained lawn, and is characterized by a remarkable elegance.  In the mid-eighties a friend of mine worked as a Science/Computer teacher at the college and she took me on a tour of the building one summer day.  The college is one of great architectural wonder, constructed of wood and stone in the grand Victorian tradition and is quite beautiful from almost any perspective.  But by far the most magnificent portion of the building is the chapel where the screen shown above serves to separate the entry from the sanctuary.  The screen is constructed of stained glass and wood and depicts the scene from John Bunyan's wonderful allegory of the Christian life, The Pilgrim's Progress, where Christian and Hopeful are about to cross the river and enter the  Celestial City.  I was immediately struck by the beauty of this work of art and asked my friend if I could be allowed to photograph it.  I was given permission and spent many hours trying to achieve  a result that would do justice to the original.  Eventually I used a 200 mm zoom lens set at f32, and with my camera on bulb took my flash behind the screen where I discharged it once behind each panel. This was necessary both to illuminate the glass and to overcome the light falling upon the screen from a ground floor door behind it, and a series of windows high in the wall before it.  The image above is a scan of one of the final test photographs, an enlargement of which hangs in my home. A larger, more detailed treatment of the final image (which I unfortunately lost) hangs in my friend's dining room.