Who Are We
Zero One Imaging is owned and operated by Brad and Wendy Nichol, we are located in beautiful country NSW, Australia.
Our focus is on providing high-quality photography and digital skills training.
Since commencing operation in 2000, Zero One Imaging has trained well over 10,000 people in the finer arts of digital photography, mobile technology and image editing.
Brad is responsible for the training development and provision and Wendy deals with all those little and not so little administrative issues.
Brad has over 40 years of professional photography experience and still shoots commercially for websites, catalogs, and tourism. He is also a very highly regarded teacher, well-known for his ability to turn complex issues into simple concepts that virtually anyone can grasp.
Main business site, has galleries, some older articles, and Zero One Imaging information
Brads Main Photography Blog site
https://braddlesphotoblurb.blogspot.com.au
Here’s Brads Story…..
So what can I tell you, obviously I’m passionate about photography, have been since I first held a camera. I was just 15 when I was captured by the magic of photography, I spent many months doing odd gardening jobs to fund the purchase my first real camera, a couple of lenses and a tripod.
That first camera was a rough bit of Siberian iron called a “Zenit EM”, it was certainly not the “zenith” of photographic instruments, but got me started upon the lifelong photographic path, I still have a couple of old “Zenits” in my camera collection, just to remind me of my beginnings.
Even at this early stage in life, I saw myself as a having a life involved in photography and nervously shot my first paying job, a wedding, at 17. I was obsessed and spent every spare moment learning all I could about the art of photography, mainly from borrowed books and magazines. There were no courses available in my small hometown and after enrolling in two arts courses which promised to offer photography and then didn’t come good on the promise I saw no option but to go it alone.
Of course, when I started in the photography business 35 years ago I never envisaged the advent of digital or mobile photography. However, I remember well a conversation with our Kodak rep who claimed ( in 1981) that the future of photography was electronic, which my best mate and I thought was highly hilarious because the only form of electronic image creation we were familiar with was lousy analog video.
Eventually, after working in a minilab/studio as a photographer and printer I started my own business at 22, full of ideas and of course totally naive. I’d been the lucky recipient of a great grounding in the technical aspects, having worked with Bart Yeo a seasoned Kodak Tech from Singapore for 2 years, he was a good teacher and I an attentive grasshopper! Bart’s lessons have never left my side.
My other great passion from an early age was teaching, I trained as a primary school teacher and later taught in a number of schools, eventually specializing in Adult Education. Over the past 37 years, I have taught for TAFE, Adult and Community Education and Corrective Service and a few others as well. At one stage a few years back I tried to work out how many different subjects areas I had taught in the Adult Ed sector, it was over 70, I’ve since added about 60 more, and currently, I run over 45 different digital workshops.
Teaching is, I feel, much harder than most non-teachers think, it’s not really about being a subject specialist but more about being a good communicator and performer, it’s also incredibly rewarding. With luck and a bit of hard work, you can go home after class knowing that people’s lives have been enriched and new opportunities created for them, in other words, teachers know they are doing something that really matters.
In reality, I am a teacher first and photographer second.
Back to the photography….around 1988, after years of working in darkrooms, I developed an extreme sensitivity to darkroom chemicals and became very ill. I was faced with a stark choice “stop it or get even sicker and wear the long-term consequences”. I chose to stop, which meant giving up one great part of my photographic passion – custom darkroom work and photo restoration.
From 1989 till 1996 I concentrated mainly on Adult Education, including managing several education programs and training other teachers/trainers, eventually I became the longest-serving teachers for NSW Corrective Services. I still took on photographic work throughout this period, basically, I just couldn’t get it out of my blood.
I had my first two major “digital epiphanies” in early 1995. Wandering through a local newsagent I found a photography magazine with an article on the new “digital photography”, it tweaked my curiosity and I instantly recalled those conversations with the young Kodak rep many years before. I bought the mag, read the articles and got seriously inspired.
Digital imaging was still very limited at the time, resolution was hopeless, costs exorbitant, tools primitive and the result far below that of film, but something told me, despite the protestations from all the established photographers I knew, this was the future!
One other thing became immediately crystal clear, if this was the future, I could once again return to my photographic roots, not in the darkroom but in the new digital lightroom.
A second obvious issue sprang to mind, I needed to learn all about computers and the core digital concepts, using the same methods.
My wife and I spent almost $5000.00 on a computer with a photo editing program, we bought a scanner and printer as well. These days that original gear would be considered beyond hopelessly inadequate but in the mid-90s it was pretty advanced and allowed me to explore the digital world and increasingly convinced me that the promise I had glimpsed on the horizon was real. It turned out to be an excellent investment in my future.
Within weeks I decided to work towards establishing a business built on the concept of teaching digital photographic skills instead of concentrating on actually shooting for a living. Again my learning options were limited, the number of digital skills courses available in my entire local region totaled zero, so I had to once again self-learn in any way possible.
Today the self-learning process in digital technologies is much easier, heck you can get many many books just like the ones I write, but in the mid-90s the number of in-depth books on digital technologies was very limited and the internet was in its infancy as a learning tool.
It took a while, after all, I still had to earn a living but by 1998 I was satisfied I had a good enough level of understanding and set about running my first digital workshops and since then……well I have lost count!
The second digital epiphany came with the release of the iPhone on the Aussie market. We Aussies were well aware of the iPhone, many of us have sat agog watching the Steve Jobs keynote where the iPhone was announced but we never saw the first model. The humble iPhone 3GS was a market tester in the land down under and sold like hotcakes!
My wife bought one on day one…and she still has a habit of buying the latest Apple wonder on day 1. After a few weeks of constantly hearing her say “I love my iPhone” I decided I was under threat of being replaced by a mobile phone and thought I’d better buy one as well, so I would at least have something to talk about.
Once I started playing with it as a photographic tool I very quickly came to two conclusions, first it wasn’t much of camera but it was fun and it offered a pathway to some amazing creative options. The second…..this was big…really big, this was the second coming for mass photography and I was going to ride that wave…..yep I had to learn a whole new skill set.
I ran the first iPhoneography classes in Australia, possibly even the world (maybe not), but let’s just say I was an early adopter and by late 2010 I had a very solid iPhoneography skill set under my belt.
And so here we are 8 years later with a new series of books that leverage off my 43 years of photographic knowledge, skills and development, I hope they inspire, clarify and intensify your photographic life.
My teaching goal always has been to make the complex…simple, regardless of how involved the subject may be and the Ultimate iPhoneography Books series sticks to the plan.
iPhoneRAW 