Last time I reported on a steam special (the Maynooth Shuttles), it was to, yet again, say that, despite our hopes, newly over-hauled steam loco No.461 couldn’t make it. Well, that finally changed this time, when she worked her first passenger-carrying train from Dublin in over a decade. She’s not quite running smoothly yet though, clocking up some very significant delays on this rail tour. Still, at least she’s out pulling trains on the main line!

No. 461 is a relatively modern steam locomotive, having been built for the DSER (Dublin South Eastern Railway) by Beyer, Peacock & Co. in Manchester in 1922. She was initially conceived as an 0-6-0 locomotive, in other words, having six driving wheels with no leading or trailing un-powered wheels, however, the DSER ran into problems with similarly sized 0-6-0 locos derailing because they were too heavy for the track, so, the design of No.461 (and it’s one sister loco) was altered, and two leading wheels were added, making her a 2-6-0 loco.

No.461 had quite a turbulent start to her life, spending some time very early on sheltering from the Irish Civil War in Belfast. After the Civil War was over she served the amalgamated Great Southern Railway (GSR), and later CIE, very well until she was withdrawn in 1965. She was restored to mainline running once before, pulling trains between 1990 and 2001.

You can read more about No.461 on the RPSI’s Website.

The two-day Spare Link rail tour kicked off with a light workout for No.461, just a short run from Dublin to the new M3 Parkway station just beyond Dunboyne. This took the train along the recently re-opened part of the old Clonsilla to Navan line, which had closed to passengers in 1947, before being re-opened as far as the M3 Parkway in 2011. I caught up with the special in Clonsilla Station. The junction for the Dunboyne branch diverges from the Dublin to Sligo main line just beyond the station.

The Royal Canal runs next to the Dublin to Sligo main line for most of it’s length between Dublin and Mullingar, and the section around Clonsilla is no different. Just beyond the junction with the Sligo Line the re-opened branch crosses the canal. The original bridge was left in place for many decades after the line closed, but, it had fallen into such a bad state of decay that it was demolished a few decades ago, so a new bridge had to be built. It’s at this new bridge that I caught No.461 as she returned to Dublin with the Spare Link.

When she left Clonsilla she was still on time, and all seemed to be going well, but her day was just beginning. From Dublin she would run the whole way down the east coast of Ireland to Wexford, and that’s when she started to pick up delays. She overnighted in Wexford before heading north again, up past Dublin and on to Howth. Howth is a very picturesque seaside town a little north of Dublin, and is served by a short branch line that diverges from the Dublin to Belfast Mainline in Howth Junction. This branch is electrified, and seldom sees any trains other than the electric DARTs.

The run up from Wexford did not go smoothly, lots of stops because of overheating axels, and, those stops were made more ‘interesting’ by a sticky mid-gear, making starting ‘challenging’. By the time she made it to Howth she was over two hours late. This was a good thing, because the traffic in the area was horrific. Since Howth is both picturesque and close to Dublin City, half the city seems to want to get there any time we get some good weather, and, the weather on the 25th of March was spectacularly good!

I set myself up in Sutton Station, about half way along the short Howth Branch. This is a former Great Norther Railway of Ireland (GNRi) station, and it still retains it’s beautiful original platform canopy.

From the platform in Sutton I was able to capture most of the action near the end of the rail tour. No.461 first passed with the special, followed shortly there after by Irish Rail 201 class diesel loco No.217 running light engine. No.217 relieved No.461 in Howth, taking charge of the Rail Tour for the short final leg back to Connolly Station in Dublin. Finally, No.461 followed the special back to Connolly light engine. I was able to capture all four movements.

You can see all my shots from the day on Flickr where I’ve collected them into a set.

As well as shooting Stills with my trusty Nikon D40, I also shot some video on my new Nikon D5100. I’ve edited the video and some of the stills together into a movie of the weekend’s events which I’ve uploaded to my YouTube Channel. I’ve embedded the video below for convenience:

Lets start with what Apple are getting wrong. Really, it’s very simple, they don’t send out patches quickly enough, particularly to the many third-party open source components they bundle into OS X. OS X benefits greatly from it’s open source Darwin/FreeBSD core. This allows Apple to include all sorts of open source tools right in the OS. Some of the more important ones are the CUPS printing library, the SAMBA Windows Networking tools, the BASH shell environment in the Terminal, the GZip compression libraries, and many many many more. Apple get all this great functionality without having to write it themselves, but, Apple do have a responsibility to patch these components in a timely manner, and they frankly don’t.

This is what went wrong with Flashback. Java was updated by Oracle back in February, but Apple didn’t get around to releasing that patch through Software Update until after the malware had taken hold in April. This is also not the first time Java patches have been late on the Mac, and there has also been a history of critical SAMBA patches going un-patched for months on end.

It’s dangerous enough to be late patching bugs in your own software, but, it’s significantly more dangerous to be late applying patches to open source components. The reason for this is that the patches to the open source stuff are out there as soon as they are released, and the changes between the code before and after show attackers where the problem is, and helps them develop attacks. By leaving these kinds of problems in your OS for months at a time, you are leaving the door open for attackers. It really was just a matter of time until someone took advantage of the opportunities Apple was leaving on the table to make some cold hard cash. Flashback was the first do this successfully, but, unless Apple get their act together on patching, they won’t be the last!

There are no two ways about it, Apple need to get better at releasing patches.

In older versions of OS X the list of things Apple were behind on was a little longer, but recent versions of OS X have brought significant improvements. In many ways OS X and Windows 7 are on a par in terms of security architecture. Both have mechanisms for requiring admin passwords to access protected files and settings, both have Data Execution Prevention (DEP) support to make it harder to exploit the most common kinds of coding mistakes, like stack/buffer overflows, and both now have good Address Space Layout Randomisation (ASLR) to make it harder for attackers to hijack fragments of OS code for their nefarious ends.

Something to bear in mind is that there are two sides to protecting code from exploitation. You definitely want to try to remove as many vulnerabilities as you can by writing good code, having good quality control, and patching promptly, because these things limit the amount of foot-holds attackers can get into your system. There is, however, an equally important second half to this equation, you also want to limit what attackers can do to leverage any vulnerabilities that do slip through the net. Humans write code, and humans are prone to mistakes, so it is inevitable that there will be bugs in all code. When you accept this painful truth, it’s obvious that you need a second line of defence, and this is where Apple are really showing promise.

Apple made great use of the closed nature of their iOS mobile operating system to really test their technologies for limiting what apps can do, and by extension, what attackers can do when they find bugs that let them hijack apps. On iOs the kernel of the OS will only execute code that has been digitally signed. If the app’s code has been tampered with, the signature will not match, and the OS will refuse to run the app at all, stopping the attackers in their tracks. As well as this, iOS also traps running apps inside so-called sandboxes, limiting their visibility into folders and threads outside their little prisons. This means that even if a developer manages to get an app that does something malicious approved by Apple, digitally signed and into the app store, the amount of damage the app can do is still very limited.

These protections are of course not perfect, because, like all code, the code implementing these protections is also written by imperfect humans, so it too is imperfect! However, by adding these layers of defence, the amount of work it takes to attack an iOS app is much greater than the amount of work it takes to attack apps running on less secured platforms. To successfully attack iOS attackers need to do three things, they need to find an exploitable bug in an app, they then need to leverage that bug to break out of the sandbox by finding and attacking a bug in the Sandbox code, and then, finally, they need to leverage that bug to find and exploit a bug in the kernel so they can disable the enforced code signing. That’s not impossible, but it is hard work, so, it’s more economical to go after less well defended OSes like Android.

With OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Apple are bringing some of these iOS technologies into OS X, though with less restrictive configurations and policies. GateKeeper in Mountain Lion will, by default, only run apps that have been digitally signed so that we can be sure they come from their supposed source, and that they have not been interfered with by a third party en-route. Unlike on iOS, Apple will allow signed apps to be distributed by any means the developer wishes, and will not be forcing them through an Apple App Store. Even in Lion Apple have introduced sandboxing technology, but again, in a more open way than on iOS. In OS X’s sandboxing regime, apps can apply for more permissions than they can on iOS, but again, apps will only be allowed the out of their sandboxes to the resources they need to do their task, but no more. So, if you download a game that will never need to see your files, then the sandbox will not allow the app see out at all. Should that game get compromised, the malware is trapped unless the attacker can also find and exploit a flaw in the Apple’s sandboxing and code signing code.

One of the key things to note about sandboxing and code signing is that they are white-listing technologies. They work by disallowing everything that is not thought to be safe. This is in stark contrast to the blacklisting techniques older technologies like anti-virus rely on, where everything is assumed safe unless it’s on their list of known bad things. We’ve been relying on blacklisting for decades, and the data is in, blacklisting simply does not work! If it did, then we’d be living in a spam and virus free utopia, and we very clearly aren’t!

It’s very brave of Apple to move towards white-listing, because it will cause all sorts of reactionary people to scream blue murder, but, from a security point of view, it puts them miles ahead of Windows, and it will probably stay that way for a long time, because I don’t see MS having the backbone to push through whitelisting any time soon!

So, are the people who say Apple are bad at security right, yes, they have done a poor job of patching, but, equally, the people who say Apple are leading the way forward are also right! If Apple stick to their guns on sandboxing and code signing, and get their act together on patching, Mac users could be in for a comparatively safe ride for a long time to come.

I was flattered to be asked to contribute five shots to the book, as well an introductory paragraph, and explanatory captions. You can buy the book from the Blurb website, but, since it’s a hard-back book, it’s not cheap. Since the book was not created to make money, and is being sold at cost price, I have no compunction against including my contributions (text and images) below.

Introduction

Having drifted away from photography in my teens, I took up railway photography again in 2007 when I bought my first DSLR camera, a Nikon D40. Although I now have a D5100 as well, the D40 still gets a lot of use, and the five shots I’ve chosen for this book were all taken with it. I shoot most of my railway photography with the f/3.5-5.6 18-55mm kit lens that came with the D40, but also sometimes use an f/3.5-5.6 55-200mm zoom, and an f/1.4 30mm prime. My post processing work-flow is centred around Apple’s Aperture 3, with quite a few of my images getting round-tripped through Photomatix Pro and the Topaz suite of plugins, particularly Topaz Adjust. Most of my shots are taken along a short stretch of the Irish Rail Dublin to Sligo main line centred on the picturesque university town of Maynooth. I like to let the landscape around the railway play as important a role in my shots as the trains themselves.

Photo 1 – Evening at Louisa Bridge

Irish Rail class 29000 four-car DMU number 29025 rounds the sharp corners at Louisa Bridge in Leixlip as it makes it’s way towards Maynooth with an evening Commuter service out of Dublin. The roof of Leixlip-Louisa-Bridge station can be see over the top of the bridge, the train has just departed from this station. The Royal Canal is a very important amenity in the area, and you can see a jogger making use of it on the left of the shot.

Some people describe photography as painting with light, when the light is perfect, even the most ordinary place can look wonderful. Louisa Bridge is not particularly photogenic with that ugly water pipe bolted on to the front of the old bridge, and the horrible graffiti covered concrete wall running next to the track, and yet, bathed in warm soft evening light, it looks idilic!

Photo 2 – Santa Special Steaming Home

An RPSI (Railway Preservation Society of Ireland) Santa Special rounds the turns at Matt Goff Bridge near Leixlip on a glorious December afternoon in 2009. The train is made up of the RPSI heritage set of coaches (now no longer permitted to run on the main line because of new regulations), and worked by 2-6-4T steam locomotive No.4. This locomotive started life on the NCC (Northern Counties Committee) railway in Norther Ireland, and was the last working steam engine on the island, going straight from it’s working life into preservation. The class were nick-named “Jeeps” because they were exceptionally versatile, and designed to run equally efficiently and comfortably in both directions.

I often hear photographers say “she’ll be running ‘bunker first’, so why even bother going out to shoot”. If you follow advice like that, you miss shots like this! The lighting and composition are much more important to me than whether or not the loco has it’s prettiest side forward.

Photo 3 – Speeding to Dublin

Irish Rail Class 22000 six-car DMU number 22042 racing towards Maynooth on a snowy March morning in 2010 with a Sligo to Dublin InterCity service. Here we see the train running down the hill towards an accommodation bridge between Kilcock and Maynooth. Don’t be confused by the numbering on the back of the train, the number 22342 refers to the individual carriage in the set, and not the set as a whole. The six carriages in the set 22042 carry the numbers 22141, 22142 … 22146.

As a general rule, westerners prefer shots where things move in the direction we read, from left to right, and as a general rule, we prefer to see things coming towards us rather than away from us, and, as a general rule, I prefer to avoid telephoto lenses for railway photography. This shot breaks all those ‘rules’, shot at 200mm with the train running away from us from right to left. It’s one of my very favourite shots, and I have it set as my desktop wallpaper to remind me that rules are made to be broken. I believe guidelines are a good thing, they generally push us towards better photos, but, we shouldn’t let ourselves be bound by them.

Photo 4 – Summer at the 15^th Lock

An Irish Rail Class 22000 DMU speeds past the 15th lock on the Royal Canal as fishermen make the most of a glorious summer day below. The boat moored at the jetty is a Waterways Ireland maintenance boat. The moon is visible overhead.

In my mind, the biggest challenge in photography is capturing a 3D world on a 2D medium without it feeling flat. Vanishing points are one way of tackling this problem, and this is one of my favourite examples of that, the parallel lines of the railway line, canal, and towpath all converge at the horizon, giving a pleasing sense of depth to the shot.

Photo 5 – Into the Night

An Irish Rail Commuter train races along the banks of the Royal Canal with a service to Maynooth on a clear Winter evening as the Moon and the planet Venus stand in the sky. The last vestiges of the dusk can be seen on the horizon, as can the lights of Maynooth Station. The headlights of the train, a Class 29000 four-car DMU, are lighting up a 40mph speed limit sign.

This photo has a especial place in my heart because it combines my three passions in one shot, astronomy, photography, and railways!

Having missed the 2011 Santa Specials because of technical issues, recently overhauled ex-DSER (Dublin South Eastern Railway) loco No.461 was suppose to make it’s return to Dublin for these shuttles after a 10 year absence, but, alas, it wasn’t to be. The weekend before the specials she encountered some more technical difficulties on her way from RPSI headquarters in Whitehead near Belfast down to Dublin. No.461 did eventually make it out to Maynooth the next day on an empty driver training run, though even that was not an unmitigated success because she was supposed to run all the way to Enfied, but only made it to Maynooth! Still, by early April she was finally ready, and she worked the Spare Link rail tour over two days (pictures and video coming soon).

With No.461′s on-going problems, RPSI stalwart loco No.186 stood in for her on the Maynooth Shuttles. Through no fault of No.186 the morning shuttle was over an hour late. Apparently someone had carelessly parked a track maintenance vehicle in front of the turntable in Dublin-Connolly station, so No.186 had to run the whole way around (and partially under) Dublin city to get to the nearest alternative turntable in Dublin-Heuston on the south-side of the city.

Still – it was a good day in all, with some lovely sunny periods between some very heavy showers!

You can see all my shots from the day on Flickr where I’ve collected them into a set.

As well as shooting Stills with my trusty Nikon D40, I also shot some video on my new Nikon D5100 (and my iPhone 4 when the D5100′s battery died). I’ve edited the video and some of the stills together into a movie of the day’s events which I’ve uploaded to my YouTube Channel. I’ve embedded the video below for convenience:

Technorati Tags: astronomy, OS X, Stellarium, Cartes du Ciel, KStars

I'll start with the best app for beginners, this is a true cross-platform app represented on Linux, Windows and the Mac, Stellarium. When it first came to the Mac it was buggy as hell. My first experiences of it when I'd just gotten my MacBook Pro were so terrible I didn't try it again until a few weeks ago. My how things have changed! Mac support is now flawless and it's quick and looks really pretty. This is the perfect program for beginners and for just seeing at a glance what's where in the sky at any time. The interface is also not at all Mac-like and a little confusing at first. Thankfully you just have to hover over the buttons to see what they do so you'll be working away quick enough. Although it's not going to be sufficient for the more advanced amateur but it's still a program I think everyone interested in Astronomy should have on their computer.

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Back when I was a windows user I loved Cartes du Ciel. There's now a beta version available for Linux and the Mac, though the pre-compiled version available on the site is for Intel Macs only. If you have a PowerPC Mac the source is available if you're brave enough to have a go at compiling it yourself. There is a slight complication in that this app has a real identity crisis. The folder it's in is called 'Cartes du Ciel', the file is skychart.app and when its running it calls itself 'cdc' in the menubar. It is also beta software and shows it a little. I have to re-enter my location each time I load it for example. It's still a little rough around the edges but it does work and I have a feeling this will be an app to watch for in the future. It's also aimed at the more advanced end of the market which Stellarium doesn't cater for very well.

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Finally, staying at the more advanced end of the market, KStars is still a very good option, a better option indeed than it used to be. You don't HAVE to compile it anymore, though, if you want to that's gotten easier too. To get a native OS X version of KStars that doesn't run under X11 and doesn't need to be compiled you can install the kdeedu package (and its listed dependencies) from the KDE 4 for OS X project. The screen-shot below shows this version of KStars running under OS X 10.5 Leopard on my G5 PowerMac.

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There is a downside to this approach though, if you download the full KDE distribution it comes to over 2GB! That's a big download! You don't have to do that, you can grab the individual packages but that's more complicated and you have to manage the dependencies yourself. If you grab the lot you get an installer (kde.mpkg) so you don't have to worry about the dependencies yourself. Also, this download is only available over BitTorrent. If all that scares you off then installing MacPorts and running the single terminal command:

sudo port install kdeedu3

Will allow you to build KStars from source. This comes with two downsides, firstly, it takes a while, secondly you'll have to launch the program from the terminal (simply issue the command kstars& and ignore all the scary text output), thirdly it runs under X11 so you'll need that installed, and finally you need the developer tools installed too.

So, all in all a big improvement since my last post on the subject.

Update - 10 April 2012: I have edited the script to run the additional commands recommended by TidBITS. The Download button will now return version 0.2 of the script.

It's finally happened, there has been a serious malware outbreak on the Mac. Over half a million Macs have been infected with the latest variants of the Flashback malware. Earlier versions of this malware relied on tricking users into running an installer, or approving a request for permission to execute, but that has all changed now. The malware moved from being a simple trojan that relied on tricking people into running it, to a fully automated attack requiring no user interaction. The reason for this transformation is that the malware started to use flaws in Java, first, old vulnerabilities that were patched ages ago, so only affecting people who don't keep their computers up to date, but this week, attacking flaws that Apple had, at the time, not yet patched. This means that for a few days, even the most diligent Mac users could have been hit.

This infection has no noticeable symptoms, and did not require you do do anything "stupid" to get infected. Any Mac user, not matter how careful, could have been infected. So, you need to check to be sure you are not one of the half million plus victims!The very first thing you need to do is be sure that your Java is patched so that you can't get infected going forward. If you are running a version of OS X older than 10.6 Snowleopard you MUST update to 10.6 or 10.7 Lion - YOU CANNOT BE SAFE ON UNSUPPORTED VERSIONS OF OS X (the same goes for unsupported versions of any OS, Windows, Linux, Unix ...). If you are running OS X 10.6 or 10.7, run Software Update now to be sure you are fully patched.

The security firm F-Secure have kindly posted instructions for removing this malware, and these instructions contain commands for checking whether or not you are infected. However, some users have found it quite challenging to follow these instructions, as the are quite dense, and require the user to execute quite cumbersome Terminal commands.

To make things a little easier, I've written a little script that will run the commands for you and report on the result.

This tester is simply a Perl script saved with a .command file extension so when you double-click it OS X will run the script in a Terminal window. I'm releasing the script under the FreeBSD License, so you can pretty much do what ever you want with it as long as you leave my copyright notice in place.

For those interested, below is the full source code:

2011 was not a normal year though. The venerable steam locomotive No.4's boiler certificate had expired in the summer, before work was finished on former DESR loco No.461 which was due to replace it. It was hoped that No.461 would be ready to work the Santa Specials from Dublin by December, but it wasn't to be, she failed to perform on her trials, and had to go back to Whitehead for more work. She's in service now, but her debut was not until March 2012. This meant that, for a change, the Dublin Santa Specials would be worked by Irish Rail diesel locomotives.

I'm sure the lack of steam was a great disappointment for the children, but, for rail fans it was a real treat. There are no scheduled locomotive powered trains on the line between Dublin and Maynooth any more, so 12 scheduled locomotive hauled services was a real treat!

On the first two weekends the trains were hauled by 071 class locomotives, No.080 on the first weekend, and 083 on the second. These were once a common sight on the line, having worked the InterCity services between Dublin and Sligo via Maynooth until the modern Diesel Multiple Units (DMUs) replaced them. Back then they were still painted in Irish Rail's old orange and black InterCity livery, but on their return last December they were painted in the new black and silver Irish Rail freight livery.

On the last weekend the trains were hauled by 201 class loco No.215 in the new Green and Silver Irish Rail InterCity Livery. These locomotives have never been a common sight on the Sligo line. Before the line was renovated they were too heavy to run on it, and since the line has been renovated the new DMUs have worked the InterCity services. To be best of my knowledge this is only the second time that a 201 class locomotive has been to Maynooth. The first being on the 13th of December 2009 when steam train No.4 broken down and NIR loco No.8208 in Enterprise livery had to step and and work the day's Santa Specials between Dublin and Maynooth.

The first day the specials ran was the third of December. The weather was really not great, so I only ventured out to capture one of the two trains that day (the later one). My favourite shot from the day is the one below, taken in Maynooth station when the train was waiting to depart.

On the second day the weather was even worse, so I didn't get any shots at all.

The third day was the 10th of December, and although it was dry, it was a very dull day with very poor light. My favourite shot from that day was also taken in Maynooth station, this time showing the locomotive in the process of running around it's train.

The next day, after a very wet start, the weather finally broke, and I was able to get my first few shots in nice light. My favourite shot by far from the day was taken as the train was on the return leg of the last special of the day. The sun had just broken through the clouds and was low in the sky giving amazing light, and I found a vantage point that let me shoot the train as it rounded the series of turns between Blakestown level crossing and Matt Goff Bridge in Leixlip.

The first day of the final weekend of the specials (17 December) was the only day where the weather was truly glorious from morning till evening. It was such a pleasure to be able to shoot in soft winter sunshine with beautiful blue skies over head. The shot below is my favourite from the day, showing off both the nice light and that lovely blue sky.

The weather on the last day was poor again, but, with a lot of good shots safely in the bag, I used the last day to experiment with some more unusual compositions and locations. As with all experiments, the success rate was not 100%, but, I do quite like the shot below, showing the special passing under Pike Bridge along the banks of the Royal Canal as it approached Maynooth.

You can see all my shots from the five days on Flickr where I've collected them into a set.

As well as shooting Stills with my trusty Nikon D40, I also shot some video on my iPhone 4. I used this footage, combined with the stills, as the raw materials for my first editing project with Apple's relatively new Final cut Pro X. I've uploaded the videos to my YouTube Channel, and combined them into a playlist which I've embedded below.

Technorati Tags: Backup, arRsync, Rsync, OS X

To create a backup just select what folders you want backed up to where and save it as a profile. Then you just have to load the profile and click a button to update the backup copy of your data. Below is a screen shot of arRsync about to start my main backup.

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As childish as it sounds, one of the things I really like about arRsync is it's icon, it's a skull and cross-bones with the regular circular sync icon instead of a head. The other nice thing about the icon in the Dock is that while you're doing your backup it shows you a progress bar! Since large backups (few hundred GB) can take a significant amount of time, particularly if you've updated a lot of files or if it's the first time you're backing up the data, this is actually a very useful feature.

All in all arRsync is a very good program because it does what it does very well, and despite being beta software it is still exceptionally stable. I've been using the current release since it came out a few months back and it hasn't crashed on me once despite the fact that I regularly backup about 300GB with it. However, there are a few drawbacks. The first is purely the fault of the tool, despite the fact that the rsync command supports synchronization across networks (via SSH), arRsync does not. I guess the developers chose to concentrate on getting the important stuff right first which is fine with me. The second problem is not actually arRsync's fault but rather Apple's! There is a problem with the way the Mac version of rsync deals with resource forks on some files. This results in errors being generated by rsync, but the good news is you can ignore them, your backup has still worked! This problem tends to come up most with files that you copy to your Mac from a FAT32 device like a pen-drive or a Windows machine. The screen-shot below shows the typical error you get when this happens:

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If you want to be absolutely certain your backup was successful even if you get the error message you can view the error log and if the names of all the files it had problems with start with ._ (as shown below) then you can rest assured that all is well with your backup.

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I find arRsync to be an excellent program that works so well for me I have no other backup software installed. What makes me even more excited about this software is that it's this good while still in Beta, just imagine how good it can get in the future!

I don't have any of the fancy gear, nor any of the fancy software, nor indeed, the skills needed to get good results out of the equipment I don't have! But, I can still get a descent shot of a star field, and all I need is three things:

1. A camera that will allow manual control of the aperture, shutter speed, ISO and white balance, exposure times of up to 30 seconds, and manual focusing or some form of focus lock
2. a tripod
3. A remote shutter release (or, as a work-around, a delayed shutter release mode)

I did also mention that you need realistic expectations, basically, what we're aiming for here is shots of large sections of the sky. Think a nice shot of a constellation. If you have visions of detailed views of spiral galaxies in your head - get them out now - that's for the pros with their fancy kit!

Getting Set Up

Start by mounting your camera on your tripod, and using the widest lens you have. Then put the camera into manual mode, set the white balance to daylight, and open up the aperture completely. We want the lowest number of mm of focal length we can get, and the lowest f number the camera+lens combination will allow. The next consideration is your ISO, you'll be varying this as you shoot, but, you'll want a reasonable starting point. If you have a lot of experience with your camera, and know how high you can go in low light before noise becomes a problem, use that setting, if not, start at a fairly low setting, say ISO 200 or so.

Next, set your camera to accept input from your remote shutter release. If you don't have one, don't panic. The reason a remote release is ideal is that you don't want any camera shake when you first the shutter. You can achieve the same goal with a delayed shutter release mode. These modes are designed for taking group shots which include the photographer. The idea is that the photographer composes the shot, leaving some room for him or her self, then hits the shutter release, which doesn't take the shot, but starts a countdown instead. The photographer then runs into position, and tries to smile before the timer runs out and the shutter finally fires. We don't want to do any of those acrobatics, but, we do want there to be enough time between hitting the shutter button and the shutter firing for any vibrations we've introduced to dissipate. If your camera allows you to set the duration of the countdown, 5 seconds should be plenty.

The hard part is getting focus. The stars are effectively at infinity, so, if you have a very old lens, this is really easy, because old lenses have markings on them, telling you how many feet away you are focused, and, a special mark with the infinity symbol for infinite focus. If you have old lenses from before you got a DSLR that you never use anymore because they won't auto-focus or meter on your DSLR, they'll work perfectly here, since you need neither of those functions! If you have a modern camera with a modern lens, you'll need to trick the camera into focusing at infinity somehow, and then disable auto-focus. If you are lucky enough to have a bright planet (or the Moon) in the sky, and if your autofocus is good enough, you can focus on that, and then lock the focus. If not, focus on something far away, like a distant house that has some lights on or something like that. If you have a Zoom lens, don't change the zoom after you focus! If you can't trick your auto-focus into focusing on something far away in the dark, then all is not lost, you just have a bit more work to do. You'll need to focus by trial and error. Point the camera at the brightest star or planet in the sky, take an exposure of a second or so, then zoom into the preview all the way and see how small a circle the star makes on the screen. Then move the focus, take another shot, and zoom in again, if the star got smaller you're heading in the right direction, if not, focus the other way! Keep doing this until you get the star as small as you can, then you're focused!

One last thing I want to mention is that primes tend to be the best lenses for this kind of thing because they tend to be much brighter than zoom lenses (i.e. primes tend to go down to much lower f numbers than zooms). In fact, although I said to use your widest lens, if you have a very bright prime that's less wide than your widest zoom, you'll probably get your best results with the the prime lens. For example, I get much better results with my 30mm prime at f/1.4 than I do with my 18-55mm zoom at 18mm wide open at f/3.5! One caveat is that it's much harder to focus at f/1.4 than at f/3.5!

Taking the Shot

The important thing to remember is that bits are free. Unlike shooting on film, it doesn't cost more to shoot more! You want to capture as many different variations as you can in the field, then pick the best ones when you get home. You really don't want to get home and realise that you really should have tried to use a higher ISO or a longer exposure.

We already know the stars move, but, there is an additional complication, how fast they move depends on how far away they are from their nearest pole. Stars close to the north and south celestial poles (i.e near Polaris or the Southern Cross) will move quite slowly, while stars near the celestial equator will move much faster. So, where in the sky the constellation you want to photograph is will determine the longest exposure you can get away with.

The other factor that affects how long you can expose for is the focal length of your lens. The more you zoom in, the faster the stars will move through your field of view, so the less exposure you'll get away with. This is why I suggested using the widest lens you have, at least initially.

What I hope should be obvious by now is that there is no hard and fast advice on exposure times, you need to find them by trial and error. So, start off with a short exposure, then zoom in and see how round the stars are, keep exposing longer until you go too far, and you start to get noticeably stretched stars, then dial it back a bit. Remember the exposure time that you think is about as long as you can get away with.

The next thing to experiment with is your ISO settings. Start off shooting at a low ISO, and then start cranking it up until the noise gets too bad. Remember how high you feel comfortable going.

Finally, compose the shot you want, and start shooting with a low ISO, and bracket about 5 exposures, some below the ideal you remembered, and at least one over it. I tend to shoot at 1 , 2, 5, 8, 10, 12, 15, 20, 25, and 30 seconds. Then increase the ISO and repeat. Keep doing this until you're at least one setting higher than what you thought was your ideal ISO. Personally, I tend to go a long way over my ideal, and shoot with the intention of using noise reduction software in post. My Nikon D5100 shoots cleanly up to 800ISO, but when I'm shooting star fields I shoot at 200, 400, 800, 1600, and 3200, and, sometimes, when I really want to try get at the dimmest things, even 6400.

If you're getting good results with your widest lens, you can try to zoom in a little if you want (remembering to refocus). As you zoom in two factors will conspire against you. Firstly, the more you zoom in, the dimmer your image will get, and secondly, the more you zoom in, the shorter your exposure will have to become. So, you'll be collecting less light for a shorter period, so don't get carried away! When shooting Orion (near the celestial equator) at 18mm, I find I get my best images with about a 10 second exposure. In contrast, when I tried to use my 200mm zoom on the Orion Nebula, I found that anything over about a second was too much! At 18mm I was getting lovely images at ISO 800, but, zoomed in to 200mm with my exposure times limited to about a second, I had to go all the way up to ISO 6400 to get a usable image!

Thoughts on Composition

Remember, stars come out as small dots. A shot with nothing but a few small dots is unlikely to look particularly interesting! I find that to add interest you need to include something terrestrial in your composition. Skylines work well, as do silhouettes of trees or buildings. You don't need to include a lot of the horizon, or a big silhouette, just enough to anchor the shot. In the example below, there is just a sliver of horizon, and just the edge of a tree, but it's enough:

on Flickr - Full-Size

If you can time your shot so that the constellation you want to capture is low in the sky, then it's much easier to find a pleasing composition, but there's no way around the fact that it will involve quite a bit of leg work to get things lined up perfectly, and, when you do, you'll have to work quickly because of course the stars are perpetually moving, so your composition is very much temporary!

If your subject is close to the horizon you can frame the entire subject, not just anchor the shot, as in the example below, where the trees frame the big dipper on three sides:

on Flickr - Full-Size

Post Processing

I don't want to give you a prescription on what to do, instead I just to share a few thoughts.

Usually, the sky will be quite bright in your image, which kills the contrast with the stars, so, a curves adjustment where you take the shadows down a lot and the highlights up a bit often works well.

In our modern world, another issue you're very likely to run into is light pollution. The nice thing about light pollution is that it's got a very specific colour, Sodium Yellow! So, the way I deal with it is to use the colour brick in Aperture to select the colour, and selectively darken it as as much as I can, and then selectively desaturate it by about 50%. I find this reduces the light pollution to a tolerable level, and it can even add a little something to the image.

If you're going to use higher ISOs, or, if you have an older camera that doesn't shoot clean even at lower ISOs like 800 (like my old Nikon D40), then you're just going to have to bite the bullet and buy a noise reduction app or plugin, and spend some time learning to use it. I use Topaz DeNoise because it's reasonably priced, and good at what it does. One thing I will say about DeNoise is that there's no point wasting your time with the presets, just use the sliders!

Something people often like to see in shots of stars is diffraction spikes (the points on stars). When you use a telescope to image the sky, the spikes are actually caused by the struts that hold the secondary mirror in place, and the arrangement of the struts will determine the number and layout of the spikes. If you want to achieve a similar effect in-camera, you can place a cross of thread over your lens hood. If that seems like too much work, you can also add the spikes afterwards in post, using a photoshop filter or plugin. A nice option is the recently released Topaz Star Effects plugin, which I used to add subtle spikes to the main stars in the image below:

on Flickr - Full-Size

Before looking at the Einstein biography, I just want to give my brief thoughts on the Jobs bio. As I started to read, I was initially very enthusiastic about the book, I was really enjoying it, and getting sucked in. I didn't know much about Steve's early life, or Apple's early and pre history, so there was lots of new information for me to devour. But, as the chapters rolled on, I found myself reading more out of a sense of duty than desire. Sure, I was still learning new anecdotes, but that was about it.

A lay person reading the book would have gained little insight into the evolution of the computer industry, or Steve's roll in that story. The 30,000ft view of Steve's life is, to extend the metaphor, clouded out. The Jobs bio is much more of a chronology than an insightful analysis of the man's life and the impact it had on the world. Steve wanted to make a dent in the universe, and did, but you won't get a deep understanding of the shape of that dent from the Isaacson biography. Major questions went completely un-asked, let alone answered! The most obvious example of this was raised by John Gruber, why did Steve think NeXT failed? What lessons did he learn from that second failure?

I almost get the impression the second half of the book was rushed, a desire to be first to market may have extracted a heavy toll from the book.

I don't want to be totally negative about the book though, so I will say that it has some gems in it, like the entire chapter devoted to the music on Steve's iPod.

So - what about the Einstein biography? For a start, I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it, I couldn't put it down! I came away with a better understanding of the man, his science, where his science fits into the big picture, and also his complex political and religious views. Something Einstein and Jobs have in common is that they were both complicated men, and they both made their biggest mark on the world in technical spheres.

Leaving aside the science for a moment, the biography gives a good insight into Einstein's unusual personal life, as well as his often conflicted politics. Why would a pacifist encourage the Belgians to arm themselves against Germany? Why would a pacifist urge the US to build the atomic bomb? How does someone utterly repulsed by nationalism become a Zionist? His views on God are also far from simplistic, and defy simple classification. All these things, Isaacson explained and analysed with impressive clarity and insightfulness.

Obviously one of the main threads that weaves the story together is Einstein's science, from his meteoric rise as a young iconoclast, to his slow evolution into the arch conservative who resisted the implications of quantum mechanics to the very last.

Explaining Relativity is no simple task, but Isaacson does it well, and he does more, he also illuminates the mental route that led Einstein to developing the theory, and he does a good job of distilling out the important impacts it had on the world of science. Similarly, he succeeds at explaining the mind-bending ideas at the core of Quantum Mechanics, as well as their astounding implications for the concept of reality, and why those implications so disturbed Einstein. It would have been so easy to get the science wrong, or to gloss over it, but Isaacson didn't, he tackled it head-on, and succeeded!

So, in short, the Einstein biography manages to distil a compelling narrative out of the many aspects of Einstein and his life, and does so in a way that makes you feel you've gained a real insight into the man, and his impact on our world.

Having read the Einstein biography, I'm left in no doubt at all as to what Steve saw in it, and why it made him so keen to tap Isaacson to give his life story the same treatment. But it didn't work. In the Einstein biography the chronology of the science forms the back-bone on which the rest of the story is hung, and you can see a very similar structure in the Jobs book. But, there is a key difference, Isaacson deeply groks science, but not the computer industry, and you can't fake insight!

There is one hint in the Einstein book as to why the Jobs biography was a lacklustre affair. There's one piece of the science that Isaacson seems not to grok, and he just ignores it. Bell's Inequality (or Bell's Theorem) is not at all easy to explain, but its relevance to Einstein and Quantum Mechanics is hard to understate. Einstein believed that God did not play dice with the universe, that the probabilistic nature of Quantum Mechanics was not a reflection of the true nature of reality, but simply a shortcoming in the theory. There must be a deeper reality, and it must be deterministic, we just have to keep looking till we find it. Equally, he abhorred what he called the "spooky action at a distance" implied by quantum entanglement. Entanglement seems to allow information to travel faster than the speed of light, which breaks the principle of locality, and strikes at the heart of relativity.

These are not easy questions to address, but Bell's Theorem does just that. More importantly, it opens these questions up to experimental test. If Einstein was right, you would get one set of answers from the experiments, if he was wrong, another. Scientists have been slowly carrying out these experiments, and although they haven't produced a definitive answer yet, they have proved that Einstein was definitely at least partially wrong. Quantum mechanics really does violate the principle of locality, and there is probably no deeper deterministic reality. It seems God plays dice in a spooky universe!

Clearly, Bell and his theorem make a vital contribution to our understanding of Einstein's legacy, but Isaacson effectively ignores them, and their far-reaching implications. Bell is mentioned in passing once in the book, without any explanation or analysis of his very important contribution to Einstein's story. The Jobs book is full of Bell moments. Full of important topics side-stepped, and necessary analysis omitted.

Something else that bears mention is how different the research for the two books must have been. Einstein was dead long before Isaacson wrote the first sentence of that biography. Decades had passed, and many books and articles had been written about him as the world took it's time to come to terms with Einstein's complex legacy. Isaacson never had the opportunity to interview Einstein, instead, he had to synthesise the big picture out of the existing material. With Steve, things were very different, when Isaacson started, Steve was still alive, and although there have been books written about many aspects of Steve's life, this was the first attempt at writing a definitive biography of him. The skill sets involved in distilling down the information in existing sources, and asking a living person the right questions in the right way are completely different. Just because Isaacson is clearly the master of the former, is no reason to assume he's the master of the latter too!

Finally - Einstein's legacy is now pretty much settled, enough time has passed for that clarity to emerge, the same simply cannot be said about Steve Jobs - he may no longer be with us, but his legacy is still unfolding before us. It's simply too early for a definitive biography to be written about Steve Jobs!

In the long run, I think Isaacson's biography of Einstein will stand the test of time very well, as a well rounded exploration of the man's life and works, based on many primary sources, while his Steve Jobs biography will be remembered only as one of the important primary sources which future authors will build on when writing more insightful biographies.