The Passing of Alan Kaplan

It is with deep sadness that my sister and I relate the passing of our father Alan Kaplan.
He died this afternoon (Tuesday, December 29) due to unexpected complications of his recovery.

A private funeral will be held for him in Massachusetts on Thursday, December 31.
A public memorial service will be held for him in North Miami, Fla in January (more information to follow).

his son, Jonathan

Update

"Al remains in the hospital, comfortably recuperating. Your messages are appreciated. Thank you." Al's son Jonathan

About Al

"Al has been hospitalized due to a mild heart attack. He is stable and in good hands. Please keep him in your thoughts and prayers. We will keep you updated if there are any changes to his condition." Al's son Jonathan

A Four-Plex? North Miami's Historical Luxury!

Hectic!

The past couple of days have been bedlam. I have stories still unwritten and photos to go with them. Give me a bit of time! Thanks.

Message On A Bottle

Jonathan

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When my son Jonathan was a young man, and we'd go someplace together, of course I'd always have a camera handy. I wasn't trying to capture this expression. I had no choice, really. The moment he'd see the camera in my hands he'd give me his ol' "Here we go again!" look. It was as challenge to get a different expression.

Eventually he got older and more at ease when confronted with a camera.

Again, this is scanned off a contact sheet, dust spots and all.

I dcn't know what restaurant this was. It doesn't look at all familiar. The camera was a Leica M2 with a 35mm f/2 Summicron

Councilman Bill Valentine And Jonathan Kaplan

I don't remember what the occasion was but Jonathan was right around his eleventh birthday in June of 1987 and I'd recently bought him a suit. It was probably a Chamber of Commerce luncheon at the Miami Shores Country Club and all of the dignitaries wanted to be photographed with him. This shot was with North Miami Councilman Bill Valentine. He's since passed away and his widow Penny Valentine runs the Chamber of Commerce.

The crummy scan is a tight crop off of the contact sheet. Perhaps some day I'll get ambitious and scan directly from the negative.

GEVABROM Passport Paper

In 1966 when Stephanie and I first moved down here from Massachusettes I got a job working at a studio directly across Flagler Street from the Federal Building. There were several studios nearby offering "passport photos in 5 Minutes" but it was closer to half an hour. We shot sheet film and printed it on this lightweight semi-matt paper. The government specs required 2.5 inch square prints showing a bit of the left ear. We went through a lot of boxes of this paper!

The boxes were handy to store fishing rod guides, hooks, spools of fly tying thread, any number of things. I still have quite a few of the boxes.

Gavaert, a Belgian company, eventualy merged with the German company Agfa to become Agfa-Gevaert. Now even that's gone, and you get your passport, complete with a digital photograph, at your local Post Office.

Just A Reminder From Monkette To The North Miami City Council

The Price of Silver has a worldwide readership and a sizeable local following. The blog's coverage of local events often gets more hits than our public relations director Pam Solomon's press releases. It certainly gets more hits from Southeast Asia, India, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, most all of Europe including the F.S.U. countries, South and Central America, Jamaica, the Bahamas, etc.

Here's a piece that appeared in a German website:

Leica Bruger Information Blog
Løst og fast om fotografi af Niels H. S. Nielsen
-Leica Bruger Information-


04 august 2006
Al Kaplan's blog
Al Kaplan er en prominent bidragsyder på www.photo.net Leica Photography forum. Al har sin egen blog The Price of Silver som nyligt blev fremhævet af Yahoo Picks. Jeg anbefaler at du ta'r et kig.

Etiketter: Blogs, kunst, Links


posted by Niels H. S. Nielsen @ 09:44 1 comments

1 Comments:
At juni 03, 2007 12:45 AM, Al Kaplan said...
Thank you very much for including my blog, "the price of silver", as one of your favorites. I wish I could read your blog but I only understand English. I found your site with a Google search.


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Ain't She Cute? Why I take More Than One Shot

Click on the picture and it'll get BIG. For about a dozen years I did the photography for the March Of Dimes. John Barret, their P.R. director and I thought the same. He didn't need to explain what he wanted. Eventually he retired, the new P.R. director had his own favorite photographer, and the March of Dimes had moved their offices from nearby Miami Shores all the way up to Fort Lauderdale.

I'm not sure who that sports figure was holding the little girl, or what her name was for that matter, but I shot it back in February 1978, probably at a golf tournament.

In the left hand photo her expression is priceless and his eyes are open. She still looks cute in the other shot but his eyes are closed. That's why I like to shoot more than one shot of a situation, and I shot more than just these two!

A Well Deserved Hiatus Or just Admit That I'm Lazy?

Or maybe I just have writers' block. Finding the photos in my files is easy enough. Oft times I'll shoot more, just for the blog. Some, like the Art Neuveau sterling silver cigarette lighter aren't really photos. I just put it on the scanner's glass and scanned the lighter directly. The color shots of the crappypark are "stolen" from the Biscayne Times, a monthly local paper. I'd previously writen about the eyesore before, here on the blog. I also wrote about the place way back before Wilma trashed the place, maybe four or five years ago.

One night I'll get a good case of insomnia, or maybe get a gig photographing one of those really cool political fundraisers, the kind where people keep going out the back door for a toke or a smoke or a snort and the allure of the white powder will just be too much to pass up. Then I'll start typing and typing and drinking lots and lots of coffee. I'll get caught up on the captions. For real.

Bayside Park? Or Garbage Dump?

A coupleof times in the past I've written about this park and included some pictures of fishing and pelicans. Then long after it was damaged by Hurricane Wilma I ran some photos of Monkette looking through the the rusty falling apart chain link barricade to keep us good taxpayers, the citizens of North Miami, away from our pier.

I've got to assume that the insurance money was collected for the damage. Yet here we are years later and nothing has been done? Where's the money?

Actually though, something has been done! The city council and the mayor found some money someplace for outrageous travel expeses, an overly generous pension, health care for life, and increased their salary tenfold. Really nice, huh? More like the scum on the water in that bottom photo.

And they're too damned cheap to increase the paltry advisory board stipends enough to cover our out of pocket expenses. Greedy self centered bastards! They told the city employees that there was no money for raises. They lied! There WAS money, but the greedy bastards put it in their own pockets. Thanks a lot!

And now Biscayne Times contributor Jim W. Harper has picked up the story along with fresh updated photos showing the same old neglect.

Thanks, Jim!

Hell, I Should Be Dead By Now!

(click ot the picture to make it big enough to read)

A Sterling Silver Zippo Lighter