Apple Quicktime VR photo by Scott Highton

Mikkel Aaland is a photographer, writer, lecturer, and the author of ten books, most recently Shooting Digital, 2nd edition (Wiley 2006), Photoshop CS2 RAW (O'Reilly 2006), Photoshop Elements 4 Solutions (Wiley 2006). His new book, Photoshop Lightroom Adventure, will be published Spring 2007 by O'Reilly.

Aaland’s documentary photographs have been exhibited in major institutions around the world, including the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris and the former Lenin Museum in Prague. In 1981 he received the National Art Directors award for photography. He has contributed both text and/or photography to Wired, Outside, Digital Creativity, American Photo, The Washington Post, and Newsweek, as well as several European publications.

Aaland’s photography and writing has allowed him a life of adventure travel and to indulge his fascination with other cultures. A six-year adventure resulted in The Sword of Heaven, A Five Continent Odyssey to Save the World (Travelers Tales 1999). A 3-year study of international bathing customs took him to Russia, Japan, Finland, Mexico, Turkey, and Greece and resulted in the illustrated history, Sweat (1978). He spent nine years traveling the county fair circuit in the United States and the result, County Fair Portraits (1981), received widespread media attention, including an interview with David Letterman.

Aaland has been a pioneer in digital photography, an interest that dates back to a 1980 interview he conducted with Ansel Adams. When Aaland asked Adams what he would be pursuing if he were just starting out, Adams discussed at length his fascination with digital photographs of the planets. Aaland has pursued this new technology since its infancy. He wrote a column on the subject for American Photographer for several years and also wrote Digital Photography (1992), Still Images in Multimedia (1996), and Photoshop for the Web (First edition 1998, Second edition Nov. 1999).

He has lectured and taught on that subject at Stanford University, Drexel University, University of California at Berkeley as well as computer graphics conferences around the country.

Aaland lives in San Francisco with his wife Rebecca and two daughters.