Panorama--Paris 13th

This is the view from our 4th floor apartment (5th in the US) in the 13th arrondissement. Here's the LARGE version.

It's early afternoon, during one of the few sunny periods we've had since our arrival ten days ago. I took four vertical shots and photomerged them in Photoshop CS5 (using the automatic option, which resulted in an completely unrealistic bulge to our street, which is straight). Chinatown is less than a kilometer toward the horizon.

Later in the afternoon I went to an exhibition on calotypes in France from 1840 to 1860 at the Biblioteque National. Invented by Fox Talbot, they were the first photographic process using a negative (of paper) which made possible multiple positive prints. Soon superseded by glass negatives, the calotype process was never commercially viable, but the exhibition had many wonderful examples.

A rather surrealistic closer view of buildings on the right is here, blipped a few days ago.