ericmw12 wrote in post #14565756
... I know that I need to be shooting in manual mode to ensure consistent exposure, but am completely unfamiliar with what ISO, aperture, & shutter speed settings I should be shooting at.
You can always use the P or Auto modes to take a shot, look at the EXIF, and then copy those settings in M mode, if you're unsure.
To me, one of the possible big problems here is that with panos, because you can cover a very large area, you can get the sun in the shot, and that's going to throw off the exposure on the other shots. This is why pano shooters were some of the first folks out there to shoot HDR. So, piece of advice 1, try to keep the sun at your back and not in your viewfinder when shooting a pano. If you can't avoid it, consider bracketing for HDR, or metering looking into the sun, and with your back to the sun, and the averaging the difference between the two. Sorry.
Piece of advice 2: Don't put only the exposure into M. You also want to choose a white balance setting that isn't "Auto" (Sunny usually works for me) or shoot in RAW, and you may also want to focus, then flip the lens's AF/MF switch to MF, to avoid having a shifting focus point. My pano mantra is "manual manual manual" so I remember all three.
Piece of advice 3: Make sure there's nothing close by in the foreground. Parallax might bite you in the butt if you're shooting a pano with nearby stuff.
Piece of advice 4: Rotate the camera into portrait orientation before shooting. This will give you more vertical coverage. You can also consider shooting multiple rows. If you do shoot in landscape, one way to make sure you're rotating the camera, and not moving it in space, is to rest the camera on the ball of your thumb, with your thumb in the tripod hole, and then rotate the camera around that. It won't be exact or at the no-parallax point, but as long as you're shooting a far away landscape, that shouldn't matter.
Piece of advice 5: Overlap by about a third of the frame so there's enough feature detail for the stitcher to grab onto and join up the images.
Piece of advice 6: Shoot more coverage than you think you need. You might need to rotate the horizon to make it straight after you stitch, or correct for a curved horizon. That means you'll end up cropping the pano. Having more area to work with gives you a bit more leeway.
Piece of advice 7: The shoot more thing goes for time as well as space. 
If a lot of people are moving through your shots, consider taking multiple images, so you can later use masks and layers to help erase ghosts and clones, or simply wait until people are out of your shot.
[Sorry. Head exploding, yet?]
Also, can anyone recommend a good free photo stitching software? I heard hugin is a nice software from a few different places...
Yup. I'll second that. Hugincan be very good. But you could also start with the Canon Photostitch software on the disk that came with your camera if Hugin's a little too bewildering. It's a little more limited and can't handle as many types of stitches as Hugin can, but it's also got a very very simple interface. You could also look at Autostitch, and not worry about exposure so much. If you have Photoshop, the Photomergefunction can also do pano stitching.
AJSJones wrote in post #14568202... Best panos are from tripod and using a device to rotate the camera about the "nodal" point.
Actually, this really isn't an issue unless there are nearby objects as well as far-off stuff in the scene. For typical landscape panos, handheld should be fine. The stitcher will typically be able to compensate for any parallax error.
However, the stitching software is pretty good - no argument there - and good results can be obtained but "
