Mikkel Aaland is a photographer, writer, lecturer, and the author of eight books, most recently Photoshop Elements 3 Solutions (Sybex, 2004).

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, Popular Science as well as several European publications.

Aaland was born in San Francisco. He grew up an hour away in Livermore, California where his father, originally from Norway, was a scientist at the Livermore National Lab, a major U.S. nuclear weapons research facility. His mother was born in Wisconsin and raised in Michigan.

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 Shooting Digital (2003), 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.

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