One of the stories that I tell over and over again is about how our family was one of the last families in our town to have a television set. My parents were reluctant to get a set and didn’t see the benefit of such an expense. Once many years later when I was an adult, my mother told me that they finally decided to purchase a television because we children were all watching television in the homes of our friends and neighbors and they decided that having a set in the home would give them more control over what we saw. When we first got out set, it was turned on for the Lawrence Welk show on Sunday evening and that was about it for a while. Soon, however, my father was watching the news after dinner nearly every night. We may have been one of the last families in our town to get a television set, but we were one of the first families in our town to get a color television. In reality, color television had been available for some time before we got one. The first color television sets cost $1,000 which was a lot at the time. We got our color television set because our father purchased and built a Heathkit. This was before digital tuning. The analogue set was nearly impossible to tune and once a station was obtained the process of color balancing took a long and complex series of steps. We didn’t really see full color on that set. At first it was just black and white television with green and orange instead of black and white. The goal of our television watching was Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color, a show that aired on Sunday afternoons. The show was aired on NBC, which used its new peacock logo to promote the fact that the network had begun to broadcast in color.

The technology of color broadcasting was relatively slow to develop. In the early days, much of the content of television and movies was produced on film before it was translated into broadcast media. And the technology of color film was complex and expensive. Even decades later, when I was in college and graduate school, color photography was significantly more expensive than black and white photography. As a student, I first learned to process and print black and white film and later learned the Kodak E-6 process for developing Ektachrome color transparency film to make color slides. The E-6 process involved a lot more chemicals and a lot more expense, and there was some risk of error involved. The summer we completed seminary, we traveled in Europe with my parents and I purchased and exposed a 100’ roll of Ektachrome film. When we returned I processed the film, which I had rolled into cassettes to use in my camera. Later, when I digitized those old slides I was able to make some color shifts using a computer program, but the color has never been really true to what our eyes perceived.

I never did learn the much more difficult and chemical intensive KL-14 process for developing Kodachrome film. The KL-14 process when done by a professional laboratory rendered more accurate depictions of reds than E-6. This was due to the different layers of film with different color sensitivities. When the KL-14 process is employed, the film is re exposed to red light from the bottom and blue light from the top at different times between developers and washes.

Now with digital cameras and editing software on my computer, I am able to obtain colors that are more brilliant than I was able to create with film photography, even when I had the film developed and printed by a professional laboratory. My photos, however, are still a bit disappointing to me. At least the colors are not the way my eyes perceive color when I am looking at the world. My vision can detect more subtleties and blends of color than come out in the photographs that I take.

Artists have struggled with color for as long as humans have tried to create images of the world around them. We see beauty and want to retain it, but what we see is always framed by the passage of time. The sky is constantly changing. The light is constantly changing. I’ve taken thousands of pictures of sunrises and sunsets over water and each one is different from all the others. And the photographs don’t come close to capturing the diversity and brilliance of color that exists in the world as interpreted by my eyes and brain. I imagine that artists who paint with pigment continue to learn about mixing color but never feel that they have achieved what their eyes can see.

We walked down to the beach a bit later than usual yesterday. Our day had been filled with some extra grandparent duties as our son and his wife took their youngest down to Seattle for a medical appointment. We got the older children off to school in the morning and were back at the farm to meet the bus after school. The oldest is enrolled in a family partnership program at the school that involves home schooling and classroom work. He was home yesterday, so we helped with his math and chemistry. As a result we didn’t get down to the beach until the sun was setting. It wasn’t a dramatic sunset as the day had been overcast. There were still plenty of clouds in the sky as we watched the sun slip behind the islands across the bay. I took a few photographs, but when I look at them on the computer monitor they lack the subtle pinks and purples that we saw.

As strong as is our instinct to capture experiences, our photographs are imperfect reflections and mere reminders of actual experience. As a result, I have learned not to try to photograph everything. Some days I just look at beauty, knowing that I am not able to capture it. I dwell in the experience of the moment rather than imagine that I might make it last. There are times when I need to set aside the camera in order to experience the fullness of color and life.