Photography tutorial - Panorama by merging photos

Over the last 2 years I have been experimenting with merging multiple photos into one single high resolution panorama. My motivation was two-fold:

1. to compensate for the low resolution of my ancient 16Mp DLRS;
2. and to compensate for the limited field of view as result of my camera's APS-C sensor.

The approach I found most easy to not screw-up is to patch the images as depicted below. Take 5 shots - from left to right - with your camera in portrait position (longest side vertical) and a 6th shot of your main subject with the camera in landscape position. The last shot doesn't necessary have to be the center of the photo.

Patching of images to create a high resolution panorama.

My motivation for the 6th shot is to prevent any stitching errors in your main subject. After merging the individual shots you can crop as indicated by the red box. Some important things to take in consideration ...

1. Make sure to have enough overlap between the shots, don't be too frugal as this might results in unwanted gaps in the end result. 
2. Shoot you photos in the manual exposure modus of your camera and keep the settings similar throughout all the shots, otherwise the end-result will look like grandma's patchwork due to the non-matching exposures.
3. For the same reason I also shoot in RAW and synchronise the exposures and all other corrections before exporting them as individual JPG files as input for the merge.
4. Check your individual shots on movement and sharpness before leaving the location. The panorama only works if all shots are perfect.
5. Use a small aperture for sharpness across the frame as this results in a better merge.
6. For the best result I recommend using a tripod but a steady hand will do the trick as well. At night you don't have a choice and can't do without the tripod. 

It might be tough to memorise all these things ... but then you'll just learn the hard way (like me). 

Example

Civitella del Tronto (Abruzzo, Italy)  - click here for more info

This merge was taken with the 6-shot technique as described above. I didn't use a tripod as there was enough light to ensure a reasonable shutter time. However, I had to repeat the sequence 3 times. The first attempt I forgot the set the exposure to manual and the second time I had a moved / blurry shot. Always check and double check!

Use the comment section below to ask me any question on this high-level tutorial.