What is "The Price of Silver-West?" A good friend of mine, Al Kaplan, posted regularly to his blog which he called "The Price of Silver." He lived in North Miami, Florida and regularly traveled about town taking photos of the people, places, and events using a small film camera with a very wide angle lens, often including himself in the photo, adding written commentary about what was happening in his part of the world, opinions on current events, people he met, and a wide variety of other interesting and funky issues of the day, as well as what he did as a professional photographer in his early life.
Before Al passed away in 2009, he sent me the well worn and somewhat broken camera body that he used for most of his blog images and placed the lens on a new camera body to continue his blog photography.
I recently repaired Al's old camera and when he gave it to me he asked me to keep it, find a lens for it, and use it to continue it's life on the West Coast in California. I just found an available lens and decided to write this new blog in his memory: "The Price of Silver-West" in my own style with my own themes using black and white film for the most part, and using Al's original camera for most of the images I will post here.
So, why Silver? The image on film is produced by light striking silver nitrate grains in the film base, unlike digital photography, thus the silver image produced being a priceless one-of-a-kind moment in time embedded in the film itself . Al was devoted to the art of film photography, may it never die.
I hope you enjoy my efforts here.
