Australian Landscape Photography by Nick Rains

Welcome to the Nick Rains Imaging Website. Within this site you will find an extensive image gallery of Australia, news about photography workshops covering both stills and DSLR video, Limited Edition print sales, over 60 articles about imaging and photography and a host of other features as well as a full collection of over 5000 images directly available online for commercial licensing.

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Dean Finlayson

Another successful Bunker Bay workshop has come and gone. We were blessed with more interesting weather than the previous years, with some excellent cloud formations over Sugarloaf Rock. The shot above was taken within a few minutes of arriving for our first shoot on the Saturday, at about 0500. I like the sense of movement in the sky and the low horizon emphasises that big sky look. Nice one Dean.

We have just returned from Borneo where we were priviledged to be able to visit the orangutans at Camp Leakey in Kalimantan. I would like to have been able to post some images whilst we were away but some bright spark in Turkey decided it would be a jolly jape to hack into my website host (JustHost) and delete the admin passwords of various sites including mine. It's take me a while to sort it out so if you have a website of your own, please pay attention to your security. Needless to say I will be changing hosts real soon.

 Orangutan, Kalimantan - Canon 5D2, 135f2.0L

Canon have kindly lent me the new EF300f.8L IS II with the 14x Extender to take on next week's trip to Borneo. Before I headed off I figured it would be interesting to see if there was much difference between my Mk1 EF300f2.8L IS and the MkII which is just becoming available after a long production delay.

Is there a difference?  In a word, Yup!

We have recently published two new articles for Registered users.

Aperture 3 Cool Tools - some less familiar aspects of Apple's raw processing application.

Telephoto lenses - how to get the most out of long lenses.

Last weekend Christian Fletcher and I conducted our Freycinet Workshop down in sunny Tasmania. Except that once again it was not very sunny, 'changeable' would be a good way to describe the weather. Luckily there is no such thing as 'bad weather' for photography and on the Sunday moring we were treated to a cool cloud front rolling in across Great Oyster Bay. With 10 minutes to go before my colour management talk everyone dashed off to the Freycinet Lodge jetty to get some shots.

The workshop itself went very smoothly, we had an excellent group of keen photographers whose levels of photoshop skills were refreshingly high (that makes our job so much easier!). Judging by the feedback so far everyone learned heaps of new stuff and were inspired to go out and take their photography to new levels of awesomeness.

"This was the best photography workshop I have ever been to...by miles!! I am very keen to attend any future workshops run by Nick or Christian so please keep me informed! Thank you for all the terrific work organising this event. It was really wonderful." Peter

"Thanks very much for all the effort you put into organising the weekend Janelle. Fantastic workshop, Nick and Christian are clearly on top of their games, so it was great having them there to share their knowledge and bounce a few questions off. Really learned a lot (considering I hadn't ever opened Photoshop before Saturday!). Look forward to hearing about future events, and hopefully getting along to a few more." Kalan

Thanks to everyone who attended and for those who missed out this time around we will be running this workshop again in 2012- same place, same time of year; watch this space for details.

Days Three and Four

Wellington National Park, Collie

Perth Seminar 18/11/11

We held the first of our print seminars at the Canon offices in Perth last Friday. We still have Brisbane, Sydeny and Melbourne to go so if you are wanting to get your head around how to get your printing squared away, there are still places available.

"The printing seminar for me was first class and, even though I have been using Canon printers for a while, I was able pick up a lot of tricks and tips that will be invaluable. Getting the workshop notes just topped it off and made for a very professional way of doing things". Peter H.

"I knew next to nothing about colour management and came away with heaps of helpful information. So very pleased. Thanks to you, Nick & Canon for an informative night". James M.

Book your place here.

Yesterday, Leica announced the release of the long awaited 30mm wide angle lens for the S2 system. It's the equivalent of a 24mm lens (84 degrees coverage) and is slightly slower than the 35mm at f2.8 not f2.5. I hope to get my hands on one soon, in the meantime here's a photo and the MTF chart for f5.6. The lower line in the chart is for 40 lpmm so the ability of this lens to resolve fine detail is apparently unmatched by any other wide lens. From this chart I'd expect to see a little curvature of focus field, like the 35mm, but this actually works in your favour as it tends to focus in the corners a little closer than you'd expect, which is good for foreground sharpness. 

Photo Mechanic, that high powered image browser used by so many news and sport organisations (and me) is being updated to Version 5 early next year. This is really big news because whlist PM is the fastest browser out there, bar none, and is amazing for fast editing of large image colections, it is still a 'browser'. (If anyone has been to one of my recent seminars on cataloguing you will know that this is not the same as a 'cataloguer' like Lightroom, Aperture and Media Pro.)

So, I was delighted to hear that Camera Bits will also be releasing a Cataloguing application at the same time. This, from the press release:

- The SQL database backend provides top-notch speed and search flexibility. Search through hundreds of thousands of photos in seconds.

- Proxles are stored separately from the SQL database files so the catalog size is only practically limited by disk space. (very cool)

- The Scanner tool lets you select folders to scan for photos and movies, and also lets you ignore folders that you don't want scanned. Photos and movies that are discovered are added to the catalog.

- Photos can be added to the catalog during ingest and live ingest.

- Searches can be as simple as entering a few words, or can be very complex queries based on dates and times, keywords (or their absence), and can be specific to certain IPTC metadata fields.

- Catalogs can be shared with multiple users on a LAN (Local Area Network). (exceedingly cool)

- Designed with the capability of world-wide access to support advanced applications such as remote editing.

I hope to see a working version soon, and will be wrting a review hopefully before Christmas.

www.camerabits.com