On a side note, this is a single exposure pseudo-HDR. I thought the movement of the water takes up too much of the frame to bother masking in one version of the water. I’m not skilled enough to hide the edges between the masked area and the not-so-masked area when it’s so prominent.

“Here ya’ go, man.”

“Hey, kid!”

These are ways I have been addressed in the last week. I love it. Since I’m about to graduate from college I’m afraid of being thrown into adulthood and torn from the pleasures of childhood. If people keep talking to me like a kid, that must mean they expect me to keep acting like a kid. While trying not to be immature, I’ll revel in this expectation as much as I can, as long as I can.

The above picture is of the outer peristyle of the Getty Villa a little over a month ago. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it’s a beautiful place.

Last summer I had the good fortune of being in a great location for sunset nearly every night. I spent the time in Geneva, Switzerland, which gave me plenty of great places to visit during the long summer evenings. When I just stayed home, though, I lived on the campus of CERN, which is right next to this vineyard. Fortunately they let just anybody walk on and tour around. I went there several times, and walked around for a couple hours taking photos and listening to some nice calming music on each occasion. Very relaxing time.

This is an HDR image, like I usually take for my landscapes, but comes from five images instead of my usual three. Getting those five images is a little bit of a pain with my Rebel XSi, which will automatically bracket three photos. The work around is to set the +/- 2 AEB, then tell the camera to underexpose by 2 stops, take the three shots, then tell the camera to overexpose by 2 stops, and take three more. Then you end up with two overlapping photos in the middle range and you can just decide which you like better for ghosting purposes. In the end, you get an eight-stop-range instead of the four stops you get with three photos. Very nice for shooting around sunrise or sunset with a very high dynamic range.

Here’s another photography question, in case I actually get a reader: should I get Aperture 3 or Lightroom 3? Since I’m asking this question, I obviously don’t have Photoshop. Given that I currently edit my photos in Picasa and Photomatix, which software do you think would give me the largest set of interesting, new things I can’t already do?

Don’t get me started on Excel. Thanks to detailed applicant profiles PhysicsGRE.com for the last three years I have been able to assemble an immense amount of data on who gets in where. I only used data from American males who are white or Asian to control for admission biases about gender, citizenship, and race. Even with those constraints I was able to get over a hundred applicant profiles. I used their cumulative GPA’s, major GPA’s, three general GRE sub-scores and Physics GRE scores to get a multivariate linear regression correlating these variables to the success these students had in applying to grad schools. For the most part I only learned what I had already been told: that the PGRE is by far the biggest factor in admissions, but it was good to get a quantitative confirmation of this frequently repeated belief. Also, I fed my own stats into the regression to see what would come out. I’m sure this has little to no predictive power, but what can I say. I’m obsessed. I’m beyond obsessed. College and graduate school admissions have become no less than a fetish to me and millions of other students. We wait on pins and needles for admissions committees to determine our fate. So far I am proud to say that I shower every day, exercise every other day (ish, but who really sticks to their exercise schedule), and do my homework. When my obsession/fetish rises to the level of a life inhibiting pathology, I’ll blog it.

P.S. If you stumble upon this post via Google searches for physics admission things, I’ll be happy to share my data with you! I even did single variable regressions (with PGRE scores) for the ten American schools I applied to (here goes: UC San Diego, CalTech, UC Santa Barbara, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UChicago, University of Illinois – Urbana-Champaign, MIT, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania). That way I’ll feel all my work has some value. In the spirit of science, I will tell you that my model predicts I will be admitted to UCSD, UCSB, UIUC, and UPenn. It also predicts I have a 52% chance of admission to the physics Ph.D. program at UC Berkeley, but for various reasons I think it’s an over-estimate. Now I have made a prediction. Good thing I paid $1,000 in application fees to falsify it.

P.P.S. All the schools have a pretty good r^2 value for the linear regression admission v. PGRE, except for Harvard, where the r^2 is a measly 0.08 from the data I have access to. Maybe they look beyond the PGRE? Or maybe Harvard is so competitive nothing matters but pure chance.

Oh, and I took this photo at the Getty Villa. Tonemapped in Photomatix 4 from a single RAW. I’m posting all these pictures from that beautifully relaxing location to try to calm myself down. Think it’s working?

Unfortunate paradox, huh? Thankfully (or unfortunately) I have physicsgre.com and GradCafe to feed my obsession with knowing every bit of useless news to do with the schools I’ve applied to. In the meantime, this was another photo I took during the serene visit I have mentioned several times recently to the Getty Villa. I don’t feel so serene anymore.

For the zero people who read this blog other than my girlfriend, she is flying to Harvard this weekend to interview for graduate school in Neuroscience. I am very proud of her. When I am an unemployed bum, I hope to follow her around and ride on her coattails.

Also, I took this picture at the beautiful Getty Villa in Malibu. This was just a handheld shot at 300 mm, so it was definitely not the best way to test out the macro capabilities of my new Tamron AF 28-300mm lens. I’ll take it out with my tripod sometime soon to get some sharper images.