Infinity focusing question, how close can it be?

My question is in regards to how close can something be in order to use infinity focusing? Last night I went down to weehawkin,nj to take a pano of the nyc skyline. They had just opened up a new walkway on the river that gave a great view of nyc. When There I said, im taking a pano of the entire Manhattan Island from the farthest northen part I could see (GWB) to the southern ( Battery Park and Verrazanno Bridge). Shots looked great on the xt's viewfinder. Got them on the laptop and was just let down at how bad they looked. Fuzzy, out of focus and just plain crap.

My settings were 15seconds @ f/8, iso100, mirror lockup, flourescent WB. one shot focus. can't remember the metering, but it was the first one on the xt's menu. Lens was the canon 24-105 f/4l at i believe 24mm and IS ON.

Took 15 shots in total, used PS2.0's photomerger software and was surprised that the program was able to successfully merge them in 1 shot without me having to line up some pics. Opened PS 7, rotated it CCW to level it, cropped it to resize it better. Adjusted levels, curves, contrast and had to use extensis noise reducer even at iso100 and the long exposure noise reduction customer function in the camera, and finally USM. I know you can see where the pics were merged. Im not concerned about this, as this is just to show you what im talking about.

This was not at infinity focusing, i dont remember what it was, but it certainly was not infinity.

Here's link since pic is to large for posting.
http://img.photobucket​.com …/Canon%20pics/a​llnyc2.jpg

For one thing, I would shut off IS when using a tripod and long exposure. It can actually induce shake if the camera is solidly mounted.
Secondly, did you focus manually and leave it at that setting for all pics?

Ok i'll hopefully be able to try again tomorow night without IS.

What I did, and im not sure if this was a good idea or not. I used autofocus on the empire state building (was first shot) then would keep the shutter pressed halfway to keep it focused, then switch manual focus and take shot. I did this as i went from left to right and then from right to left of ESB.

also for a pano of this size. What would be a decent size for the length and width? I know the length was around 5000 at 25% on pse2 before I resized it.

and again im a lil confused as to why i got the screwed up skies from the different pics. the settings were the same for each shot. is there any way to avoid this?

Using auto-focus to get the initial focus is fine, but then as you said, you want to lock the MF/AF switch on the lens before taking shots. Also, make sure you are using a manual exposure setting and keeping it the same across all shots. Lastly, make sure you are not using any kind of polarizer or filter that might affect edge brightness or light fall-off. That causes dark edges on each shot that are very hard to blend together.

P.S 7.0's photomerge isn't anywhere near as good as the later versions, and CS3 puts them all in the dust with it's excellent automated blending functions.
Many people that do a lot of pano's use specialized applications for that purpose.

Size is a personal decision.
If you shoot al the shots in portrait and merge them, your camera's width will end up being what your height is, and the number of images from edge to edge determines the final width.

I've seen panos that were made of hundreds of shots, in row after row, all stitched and blended into a mega-image.

Thanks SWP. I did that with the AF/MF, switched to MF before snapping the shot. I also shot in Manual 15@f/8 for all 17 shots. I made sure of this, last time i tried a pano of nyc awhile back i had it in Av. No filters were used at all.

Im going to try and go back down sunday night. I should've gone tonight, crystal clear out but very windy. Im going to try the portrait shots instead of landscape.

So is there a chance that if I use photomatix pro i'll have a better looking stitched pano?

PMP or CS3, both do a better job of blending.

The pano you've posted is 800x103 pixels. Far too small to see why it's "fuzzy, out of focus and just plain crap". Can you post a larger version?

The pic in the link is really small, but if you get all your kinks worked out (IS off) this promises to be an awesome pano. I can't wait to see your next try

I calculate the hyperfocal distance at that aperture and f stop to be 4.889 feet.

guys i promise to have another pano. I still didn't delete the card and actually used photomerge again in PSE2.0. I made a stupid mistake while merging the pics the first time. I had extra pics of 2 different spots. 1 was at a longer focal length, the other of a shorter shutter speed. So i never took those out of the pics to be merged section. When I did use the proper pics it came out alot better looking, no signs of merging at all.

So now its off to get clearer pics. Tonight would've been perfect. Maybe tomorrow with new 40d??