Panoramas

How would I go about shooting and stitching Panoramas? Do I need a special panoramic head? How would I go about doing it without one? Would 17mm on a 17-40 be okay for it, or would the distortion be too much?

you can use you kit lens to do panoramas. Use a tripod then just put the pictures together in photostitcher.

The reason I asked lens-wise is because that's the lens I shall be purchasing. Thanks so just a tripod and lens will work with Photostitcher?

There are a number of tutorials out there on panoramas, but some of the advice I have consistently seen is to shoot vertically and make sure there is plenty of overlap at the edges. Also, you will probably want to shoot ath the longer end of your lens's range in order to minimize distortion at the edges where the stitching has to occur.

You don't even need a tripod. You can shoot panoramas hand-held quite easily. Theoretically it can cause parallax problems, but I've found that with software like AutoStitch the results are almost always fine. (Panoramas containing objects in the foreground would be better with a tripod though.) Autostitch will also cope quite happily if some of the shots are slightly misaligned or rotated relative to the others, and it can even cope if the focal length changes half way through! (That happend to me by accident recently: I was very impressed that AutoStitch didn't seem to care.)

One thing to be wary of though is that, if you want the finished panorama to be nicely rectangular, you need to make sure you leave enough room top and bottom to crop it nicely. That's harder to judge hand-held.

Here's an example of a panorama I shot entirely hand-held. The original is 16,551 x 2,689 pixels. I hope it inspires you to get out there and shoot!

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Make sure you shoot in M mode so your exposure is the same throughout. Apparantly Autostitch is good at fixing exposure related issues and I might need to try it, but I had a go at panos in Av mode and have been unable to fix it enough to stitch.

Absolutely. M mode is essential. Also it's a good idea not to use Auto White Balance.

The 17 may well pose stitching problems with distortion: I'd go for the 40 end.
Don't forget to turn the camera upright (portrait) if you want the maximum pixel count in your final image (presuming the panorama to be horizontal).