pete zivkov.blog

I’ve produced dozens of photo books since I started photographing professionally in 2000. Here are some of my favorites, and a few duds too:

2002-2004 - A Collaboration of Friends and Photographers (with Barb, Sandy and Jay Smith). I did 3 different annual editions. 2004 had beautifully sharp photos with short poems and lovely quotes about the Sierras and nature to match the visuals. I printed the pages myself on premium paper and had them nicely bound through a commercial service. 8x10" inkjet prints, hardbound with a leather & cloth cover.

2014 - Iceland. Quiet, lonely landscapes and travel photos of Iceland shot in 2005 before it became such a big tourist draw. Printed with Blurb.com.

2007-2020 Viewfinder - 14 years of annual collections of my students' photos. There's incredible variety and some spectacular photos. Looking at them reminds me of all the fun I had working with young adults. All 14 editions printed with Blurb.com.

2012 A Blank Book (decorated with Mission District Doorways) - A practical blank book for writing, taking notes, doing drawings or daily journaling. 6x9" softcover "magazine" printed with Blurb.com.

2013 Havana - Strong portraits of resilient people combined with the beautiful colors of decay in tropical Havana. Collaborative effort with Barb Zivkov. 12x12" hardbound printed with Blurb.com.

2014 Hardangervidda - Trekking in Norway after a bad bike accident was a life affirming experience. One I will never forget. All shot with iPhone and Hipstamatic app. 12x12" hardbound printed with Blurb.com.

2015 - Patagonia This one's a dud. All the pages were dark and murky. I didn’t like the thick, flat fold paper stock either. I forgot to edit the images for print (they need to be 10-20% brighter than the screen). Damn it!

2017 Peru and Bolivia - Square, small format, hardbound travel photos. I love the square format. It's so versatile. You can see that I use it often. 8x8" hardcover printed with ChatBooks.

2011-2022 - Monthly ChatBooks - I have about 50 of these small, thin (6x6") softcover booklets of my Instagram posts printed through the ChatBooks app. Each month I would select and sequence 30 images and any captions that would be sent to print. Easy peasy when you break it up into a small monthly project.

2022 Panama - I just LOVE my photo of a sunbathing sloth on the cover. So damn cute! 8x8" softcover printed by Chatbooks.

2025 - Elysian Way Turkey - Big, colorful photos all shot with my iPhone 15 Pro. A few of the cropped photos that were printed on a full page look a little too sharp/over-processed. Live and learn... Large 12x12" hardcover printed by Blurb.

And a few more, published more recently in 2026:

2026 - Desert Folio - Bold, high contrast black and white images of saguaro cactus. These were shot in 2025 with my infrared camera which creates black skies and bright-white cactus. No text, just photos that speak for themselves. 8x10" hardcover printed by Blurb.

2026 - Life - Special Travel Photo Edition Exploring the Mysterious Maya, A 40 page travelogue and magazine of photographs of Maya sites in Belize and Guatemala. 8x10" softcover magazine printed with Blurb.com

I started roasting my own coffee beans recently. I just couldn't find decaf medium roasted beans. They were always too dark and tasted burned to me. So I bought a FreshRoast SR540 from Sweet Marias and some bags of green (regular and decaf) coffee from BurmanCoffee.com.

So far, I've roasted Columbian, Peruvian, and Ethiopian beans, about 5 lbs in total. The flavor of my roast has been excellent and the price is certainly better than the specialty beans I was buying at CoffeeBar.

I even made a sticker/label for the samples of roasted coffee beans I give out to my friends.

During and after my January 2026 visit to photograph Maya sites in Belize and Guatemala, I shared some of my work on social media (Facebook, Instagram and Flickr) like I normally do.

However, I also decided to produce four printed versions and styles of my Maya series photographs for various audiences:

Postcard Set: I printed Vintage-Style Postcards of the four Maya sites which I visited. Each of the 4 postcards featured a faded color image (1920s style) on the front and a short description on the back with an old Belizean or Guatemalan postage stamp on the back. I made a series of 20, rubber stamped the series number over the stamp, and mailed them to a group of friends interested in travel, history or art.

Travel Journal Magazine: "Exploring the Mysterious Maya" is a glossy, large-format, day-by-day description of my trip. It is illustrated with both large and small colorful photos of my experiences exploring, birding, eating, photographing and relaxing. It features just a few of my hero photos of Maya sites. It uses a 1950s style LIFE magazine design and incorporates playful vintage illustrations, ads and maps related to Belize. I printed a run of 10 magazines through Blurb.com and shared them with friends who have an interest in magazines, travel, birds or Belize.

Art Photo Book: "MAYA Codex 2026 - Real and Remixed" a medium-format (8x10"), 75 page coffee table book is a formally designed art book featuring 1) infrared B&W images of Maya sites and 2) remixed images which I processed digitally and by hand, as a response after my visit to Belize. Unlike the magazine, the book has almost no text, just an index page of photo titles and captions. I printed a short run of 3 books through Blurb.com and sent one to a fellow traveler on my tour as an unexpected surprise.

This is a hand-made, home-made, small format, photo art zine, which uses a semi-random combination of recycled ideas, printed pages and materials from two recent Maya themed projects, a magazine and a photo book .

With this project, I wanted to relax and improvise on my usual slow and methodical design process. I wanted to use a quick, low-fi, minimal design, and scrapbook style production at home for a small run (15-20) of experimental art zines. More specifically, my goals were:

Re-use existing printed pages (left over from other Maya projects)

Incorporate a broader variety of papers, textures and colors

Use randomness and surprise so that each zine is unique

Incorporate elements of collage and hand drawing

Minimize design and production effort and time (no writing)

Accept and adopt any design, printing and production errors

Learn to do hand printing, binding and trimming at home

Link the printed zine and my blog through a QR code

Enjoy and have fun making these (so it's not a task or a job)

Here's what the pages look like on zine #18:

Outcomes:

I really enjoyed doing this project!

It was an experiment, so my expectations and ambitions were low.

There was no stress or worry about errors or missing details.

Each zine was unique, so there was no need to be uniform or precise.

There was no looming deadline and no text to be written/edited.

Mixing media was super fun, I could easily add bits and bobs.

I loved the idea of recycling/reusing pages that I had pre-printed.

I worked from my laptop & iPhone or by hand directly onto paper.

Some learnings for next time:

Simple designs tend to be "better" than ambitious or complex ones.

Folding letter sized sheets in half was ideal for this project.

I'd avoid cutting larger paper sheets down to letter size next time.

I was clumsy with hand binding at first. I soon got much better.

Trimming the zine edges was hard without a big rotary cutter.

The thin vellum pages were pretty, but required special printing.

My plain paper is too thin for two sided inkjet printing (it bleeds).

I need to get more natural paper tones. (ecru, off white, etc).

Packaging papers (cereal boxes) make for good card stock.

I took a photo class as a freshman at Case Western Reserve. I learned how to meter exposure, process film, print in the darkroom and make mounted/matted presentation prints. In fact, I still have these matted prints which were part of my final class assignment. I was especially proud of the first image, my self portrait.

My fourth ArtPrints For Friends project (May 2026) is a spring themed postcard and a "SCAREE: A Guide for Better Photography", which I used to teach my high school photo students for many years before my retirement.

While sorting through my parent’s photo archives, I found some of my earliest photos from middle school. I used my dad’s medium format, Yashica TLR and flimsy travel tripod, to shoot these long night exposures while on a family trip to Washington DC. I guessed at the exposure time and was delighted that they came out at all! Notice the trailing car taillights in the street photo. That was super cool!

These photos encouraged me to take a photo class in 8th grade and to process and print film. I used the Yashica for my first concert pictures, my cousin’s band performing at a middle school dance. I think that's stage fog coming in from the left!

I still have my dad's Yashica and my black OM-1.

In 9th or 10th grade, I got a job after school (stock boy at Minnesota Fabrics) and earned enough money to buy my own 35mm camera, a beautiful black Olympus OM-1 with a 50mm f1.4 lens. I shot these double exposures (my car in a mailbox and self portrait) as a senior in high school in 1978.

My parents produced and saved thousands of photo prints during their lifetime. These are stored in unlabeled albums and in envelopes. My project goals are to:

Reduce the archive by deleting unwanted photos

Create three piles: most important, wanted and unwanted photos

Archive, protect and digitize the most important photos

Save the most important photos to cloud storage

Share some of the most important photos with other family members and friends

Create an artful printed booklet of selected photos documenting my parents lives

I hiked and photographed at The Ledges in Cuyahoga Valley National Park, a beautiful and massive sandstone rock formation.

I shot a lot (about 80 photos) with my iPhone and then ran into some challenges during editing. I wanted to keep the photos in color to preserve the vibrant colors of the golden stone and green moss, but also wanted to visually simplify the complex shapes and textures around the main subjects. So I used strong vignetting, blur and desaturation around the main subject to make it more prominent.

The finished set of ~20 photos are visible on my Flickr account. A few examples are shown here for reference.

While in Chicago I visited Central Camera and suddenly felt a lot of nostalgia for old cameras and film. After all, I'd used film since my teens and taught high school film photography for 15 years before retiring.

My visit also reaffirmed my personal preference for digital photography. I have loved them both. I have a lot of experience with film, alternative processes and film/digital hybrid work flows, but I am most productive, and free to create, when working in the digital domain. I believe I can produce the look of film with my digital tools whenever I want.

For me, working with film is more 1) time consuming, 2) unpredictable, 3) constraining and 4) costly,. Therefore I use film very selectively on a few very specific projects.

We had a great time at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. I enjoyed photographing the sculpture garden and seeing Kristine Sun King’s clever exhibition on her perspectives as a hearing impaired visual artist.

Visited Open Book in Minneapolis today. I enjoyed a nice coffee, seeing an exhibit on “passports” and then browsing the handcrafted books, cards and zines on display. I bought some handmade paper, glue, a stamp, cards and souvenirs.

This exhibit has inspired me to work on a new project to design and print a personal/expandable passport booklet that would contain a chronological record of my international trips (with a photo, entry/exit dates and immigration stamps for each country).

I'm preparing a folio of prints for a few special friends in Tucson. This will be the cover of the folio envelope. They'll be printed on individual Hanemuhle Photo Rag Metallic paper sheets. Here's what the print set will look like. Feeling very excited and pleased to complete this project.

I also prepared an expanded book version (with landscape images) which you can see on Blurb.

I recently got my eyes checked out and got to walk out with these retro-cool Devo glasses so I could better see our Beautiful World.

Eyes are pretty amazing! Check out these HIP images from the Human Organ Atlas. Heard about it on NPR’s ScienceFriday podcast.

I've just designed and published my latest art photo book project.

MAYA CODEX 2026, REAL and REMIXED, is a visual exploration of images, "real" and constructed, as well as memories from a trip to Belize and Guatemala to photograph four "Lost Maya Cities" with an infrared camera. It explores ideas of discovery and historic loss, formal and informal photos, travel photographs of a "lost civilization" and the contemporary culture of re-mixing photographic media.

It's available on Blurb.com for viewing and for purchase. Here are what the first few pages look like:

Here are some artworks that got my attention at the show. I liked or admired something about them, or wanted to try to make something about them for my own projects.

Love the muted color palette, mix of sharpness and blur and the subtlety of these two pieces.

Heavy grain adds texture to an abstract piece using complementary colors.

I loved the hand gesture and the use of deep blue colors. Very mysterious and dramatic.

Muted and unusually simple color palate.

I liked the modular practicality of these shapes. It’s a format I would like to try.