[Zig]

This!
Half a mile away from Castle Zig today in sweeping sunny showers, so I really wanted to catch the effect of the light across the hills.
This is a stitch+blend of a few shots taken in succession with the 50mm f1.8.
I was having to be quick, so I went handheld at around f6-ish(ahhh, stepless apertures...luxury...)
Right, for those who get their jollies by such things: the proper version of this measures 12950 pixels across the base, 3450 high.
The image at 300ppi is 43x11 inches..gulp!
I used a brush 2200 pixels big to dodge and burn, which made my pc beam with gratitude.

[adam]

wow, that a huge log!
a huge picture!
a nice picture!
are you going to print it?

[matthew]

That's an amazing panorama. I've tried a few, with a tripod and carefully leveled camera, carefully pivoting 15 degrees with each frame - and they stink. Do you have a tutorial handy?

I used a brush 2200 pixels big to dodge and burn, which made my pc beam with gratitude.

[shuttertalk]

That's fantastic Zig... great composition, treatment and mood ... and the numbers are just mindblowing. Your PC must be chugging away something awful when you do the stitching...

[Petographer]

Great Looking photo Zig. The B&W conversions you've done lately are excellent.

[Zig]

Am a bit lary of trying to give succinct feedback on the feedback, as if I sat down and enumerated everything I considered or did from camera out of bag till "finished" shot, I'd sound very tedious and scientific...yet I'd still not actually know a great deal of what I'd be waffling on about.
When I lurked for a fortnight in a bottom-feeding sorta way around places like the Max Lyons forums, it struck me that there are folks doing all kinds of mosaics, panos and bizzare shapes often for no other reason than Mallory climbed Everest: it was there, and it was fun to get one's teeth into.
Some are pioneers of number-crunching, seeing just how vast a file size they can get; others are into the "pano thang" for either rectilinear or cylindrical output; others(like me) are merely trying to do what they normally do: get an external highish resolution image of the internal image that was in their head as they first saw the shot.
There seem, as ever, as many ways as there are people.
There are tedious bores who seem to love some kind of power-buzz that they get when they tell you how much money they've spent; tales of mission-critical angles, parallax-correcting heads and all manner of software arcana and standalones("ooh, so much better than plain vanilla CS2" and the like); yet there are also those who see a nice shot and just want to maximise the potential of their 3MP digi point+shoot. Again, there are folks who are requiring a high-res image for a client and who feel they cannot justify the expense of full-frame digital, let alone medium-format and Leaf digi-backs. Many confess to revelling in the train-set-in-the-attic style fun of stitching them all together, and are unfazed that their image is too large to be cost-effectively printed at all.
I wouldn't know where to start with a "tutorial" as such, except to say that the best way I've found to "do" this stuff is doing just the same as any other shot:
1.see what the light, tone, texture and composition are doing, whilst deciding to "see" in your mind's eye either in colour or mono.
2. I think it was David Hockney who said that the best way to compose was to work out the edges and work inwards! So, I try and think about that.
3. As light changes constantly, I meter and focus quickly. I dial in whatever the meter says for green grass, flip it to manual, lock or disengage any autofocus, decide on the white balance and lock it. All this is just reducing the variables: anything for a quiet life, me.
4. I never use anything wider than a 50mm, ideally keeping the main features of interest at least 30 feet away...easier to work with. I broke this rule for the log shot above: I really didn't have time to walk back, recompose, scratch chin, nor change ASA to something that would give better depth of field. Consequently, the shot is "distorted": it was either straighten the horizon or bend the log in post-processing(the log in real-life was straight as a die!). I knew that the sweep of the hills was already curved, so I relied in advance on this feature making it easier for me to bend the trunk and get some degree of symmetry between the curve of the hills and the software-distorted trunk.
Total taking-time, inclusive of all these things subliminally rattling around my head, was no greater than 20 seconds; the light would have gone otherwise.
Finally, I shoot in raw, so I never think of a mono as a "conversion", but as a black and white negative(if I've me mono 'ead on); thing is, if it works fine as mono, I've found that mostly it looks pretty good if I convert it to colour, as I'd have tried making a it a decent shot already. The colour would thus be the "added extra" rather than the main feature, I suppose.
Matt: I hope this explanation will do instead of a "tutorial"! Over at the Max Lyons site are folks who've been doing these things for yonks, whereas I only have about 6 weeks' experience. There are some knowledgeable people there.
Jules: oh yes; I'm sure if I left my pc alone for an hour, it would have phoned both its mother and Social Services, sobbing at the cruelty and punishing abuse at the hands of Zig!
(I must be nuts: am writing this at almost 5.00am! Apologies if it shows!) Hope I've covered most points here.

[matthew]

Thanks for the explanation. I think that perhaps part of my difficulty is that I'm approaching it as a technical problem instead of an artistic one. That, and getting more experience.