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Interview with Mikkel Aaland, author of Photoshop CS2 RAW (O’Reilly Media)
Photographer Mikkel Aaland is a writer, lecturer, and author of nine books, including Shooting Digital (Sybex), The Designer’s Bookshelf “Best Digital Photography Book” for 2004. Mikkel’s documentary photographs have been exhibited in major institutions around the world, including the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, the Stockholm National Gallery, and the former Lenin Museum in Prague. In 1981, he received the National Art Directors award for photography. Mikkel served as an editor for the Swedish FOTO magazine, wrote a monthly column for American Photographer, and contributed articles and/or photos to several publications including Wired, Digital Creativity, Pre, Newsweek, Graphis, Outside, Popular Science, and MacWeek.
Six of Mikkel’s nine books focus on digital photography, a subject of intense interest for him over the past 25 years. You can learn more at Mikkel’ site, www.shooting-digital.com. For information about Mikkel’s latest book, Photoshop CS2 RAW, visit www.oreilly.com/catalog/photoshopraw. (ASMP members: get a 30% discount by using this code.)
Take a look at a few of Mikkel Aaland's favorite images in our ASMP Member Galleries.
O’Reilly Media recently interviewed Mikkel at his studio in San Francisco. We have reproduced the interview by permission of the publisher.
O’Reilly Media: You’ve been described as a digital photography pioneer, owing to an interview you conducted with Ansel Adams in 1980, four years before he died. What did you learn from him?
Aaland: I’d just started working for FOTO magazine, and we were in the midst of interviewing various photography masters. I was very fortunate to arrange an interview with Ansel down at his home in Carmel, California. He told me, “If I was starting out again, I would be interested in creative video and electronic imaging.” He talked about incredible photos of the moons of Jupiter taken by Voyager, and he envisioned what he could do with his own photographs. He was blown away by it.
I had never considered electronic photography, as we called it, until that interview. From that point on, I told my editors in Sweden that we really had to explore this. I went to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena and spent a day at the source of electronic imaging for the space program. It was a great opportunity to learn about this stuff, which JPL initiated in the 1960s. I tried to interview Edwin Land, founder of the Polaroid Corporation, because I thought Polaroid would take us into the electronic age since they were into instant photography already. I became kind of a sleuth, trying to track down what people were doing. I was so excited. I was all over the place. Not long afterward, in August 1981, Sony announced the Mavica, which was an electronic still video camera. It was everything that Ansel had been talking about as a consumer camera.
Q: Did you get to use any electronic cameras back then?
A: I was commissioned by the editors of Newsweek in 1984 to produce a feature using the “camera of the future” for the publication Newsweek Access. I tried to get several companies like Sony, Nikon, Canon, just about everybody, to donate cameras so we could do some field work. I got a lot of rejections because they weren’t ready yet. About a year later, I tried again for American Photographer. We planned to have five well-known professional photographers spend a day experimenting with a filmless camera, and I was in charge of organizing all of that. But, again, we got rejections because the camera companies weren’t ready. This was typical of the early days: There was a lot of talk, a lot of excitement, but not much show. Still, it was a very exciting time. The personal computer was just coming online then. In 1986, I had a monthly column in American Photographer on computers and digital technologies.
Q: What was your own work like in those days?
A: At the time I interviewed Ansel Adams, I was in my final year on the county fair circuit. I spent nine summers from 1971 to 1980 working in a portable studio that was hauled from fair to fair in California and Arizona. The studio was complete with darkroom and a shooting stage and it took a crew of three to run it: a shooter, a front man to handle customers and a darkroom person to develop and print the 4x5 inch negative. When things went smoothly, the process took about fifteen minutes, and we’d shoot hundreds of portraits a day. Chemicals would be flying all over the place. I was looking for summer work in 1971 and I got the job because I fit in the darkroom, which was a tiny little closet. From 1976 on, I was primarily a shooter, which resulted in the book County Fair Portraits (Capra Press). Those portraits have been displayed all over the world.
At the time I met Ansel, I was coming from this very wet, nasty chemical stuff. I was tired of chemicals at that point, and I got excited about an electronic pathway instead of a chemical one.
Q: When did you actually start using digital equipment?
A: It was 1990. I got a job shooting a multimedia project, which was destined for a CD, and I convinced the producers that we could save a lot of money if we used an electronic camera instead of a film camera. So, we used a $20,000 high-end professional Sony Mavica. I think the resolution was 640 x 480, but it worked for what we were trying to do, because I was shooting for the screen. When my book Digital Photography (Random House) came out in 1992, I said, “the future is now.” You can see why. It had been over 10 years since I’d been following this stuff, and I was convinced at that point that it was going to explode. I was about 10 years off.
Q: How did you get involved with multimedia?
A: It was a natural step after my interest in filmless photography. Multimedia was a very interesting venue for photographers, and the still video camera made sense. Remember HyperCard and Laserdisks? We were doing that. I got together with Michael Rogers, Newsweek’s New Media guy, and started Tor Productions to explore interactive storytelling. We had a lot of fun, and I think we were very effective in helping to launch the New Media.
It never took off the way we envisioned it, because something called the Web came around. We went from Laserdisks to CDs and then the Web. It was a huge change. A lot of the principles we had learned for CDs and Laserdisks still applied, so we were able to port those over. I did some stuff for Newsweek’s web site using digital cameras and for The Washington Post when its site was going up. My book, Still Images in Multimedia (Hayden Books) spun off into workshops in the mid-’90s for various publications that were trying to establish a web presence.
Q: How influential do you think you’ve been in convincing your fellow photographers to make the shift to digital?
A: I’ve always thought of myself as kind of a bridge, helping people cross over to the new technology. It was clear to me back in the early days that this was where we were going. It just made so much sense. That’s why I’m involved in all of these book projects, and why I do so many lectures at Stanford, Drexel University, UC Berkeley, and computer graphics conferences around the country. More photographers are making the leap, but they’re not sure what to do once they shoot the pictures. How do they use the software? How do they make good prints? Each step along the way requires some help. My father’s an engineer, so technology doesn’t intimidate me. But I understand how it intimidates others. It’s rewarding to walk into a room of photographers who are clearly terrified of the technological changes occurring all around them, and to be able to assure them that it’s going to be all right, that they’re actually going to enjoy it once they get over the fear. I feel like I have a calling and I’m effective at it.
Q: Your new book, Photoshop CS2 RAW, talks about the new file format that’s becoming very popular. Why is the RAW format so important?
A: I had one epiphany with Ansel Adams, and another when I finally got the concept of RAW. RAW is like the primordial ooze, you can’t even see it. It’s just data. We want to work with raw data as opposed to TIFFs or JPEGs, because with those, the camera has already done the work. It makes a print, really, from the raw data, then it throws away all the information it thinks it doesn’t need. It’s gone, irretrievable. Working directly with raw data lets me take control. It’s like taking your negative to a drugstore. They’re going to make a decent print, but if you really want to make a superior print, you’ll take that negative to your own lab and apply all the skills and knowledge that you’ve learned.
How you use software to assemble raw data determines how it’s going to look. Photoshop CS2 has three distinct environments: Adobe Bridge is an organizer. The Camera RAW plug-in does the heavy lifting, the conversion. Then you have Photoshop, the application. If you use those three applications together, you can do amazing things with raw data. Everything from resizing to white balance changing to extending exposure latitude, sharpening, and getting rid of chromatic aberrations. All these things are at your fingertips. Camera RAW does global changes. For localized changes, you use Photoshop. Not every digital image needs to have a RAW file. I advocate shooting RAW when you know you need to get the highest possible quality, such as landscapes. RAW takes up more file size in your camera, and it does take a little more work. But ultimately, the payoff is much greater.