Nicholas John Caire photographer, was born on 28 February, 1837 in Guernsey, Channel Islands, son of Nicholas Caire, auditor, and his wife Hannah Margaret, nee Cochrane. He arrived in Adelaide with his parents about 1860. As a boy he had developed a passion for photography. He received help and instruction from Townsend Duryea and was soon making competent picture of his friends. By 1865 he was travelling through Gippsland, taking wet plate pictures of Aboriginal people at Lake Tyers and landscapes of the Strzelecki Ranges.

By December 1866 he had his own studio at 97 Hindley Street, Adelaide, where he concentrated on the professional photographer’s stock-in-trade, carte-de-visite and cabinet portrait work.

In 1870 he married Louisa Master and moved to Talbot, near Clunes, Victoria. There he practiced his photography until 1876 when he brought T F Chuck's studio in the Royal Arcade, Collins Street, Melbourne. His skill in the new technique of the vignette won him custom when more conventional photographers still printed family portraits at full length.

Caire exhibited at the 1879 Sydney International Exhibition, the 1880-81 Melbourne International and the 1883-84 Calcutta International (where he was awarded a silver medal for his photographs of the Melbourne Botanic Gardens).

In 1885 the development of the dry plate method revolutionized the scope of the landscape photographer. Caire gave up his city work, made his home and studio in South Yarra and devoted the rest of his life to outdoor photography, specializing in the bush, the gullies and the mountains of south-eastern Victoria. When X-ray photography came to Australia he gave his services one day a week free to the Melbourne Central Hospital.

He left many albums of prints collected under subjects such as waterfalls, rivers, fern gullies and sea caves, along the Victorian coast. A few of his negatives have been kept but most of his glass plates were cleaned off during the shortages of World War I when Caire needed the glass for framing his pictures, a major part of his business.

He died at Armadale, Victoria on 13 February 1918, survived by his wife, two sons and four daughters.