8-Photo Pano Taken This Morning (click for larger version)

Here's one from our dawn shoot; it's El Capitan, and the sun just peeked through when I shot this 8 photo pano. I opened the eight photos in Photoshop CS3, and opened the PhotoMerge Automation (in Photoshop since Photoshop CS, but enhanced in CS3), and Photoshop did all the work, first time, with no fussing or adjusting whatsoever. The trick is to shoot the pano so photomerge will do all the hard work for you. I didn't use a special panoramic tripod head---just a regular ball head, but here's what I did in-camera to make the stitching together of the eight photos in Photoshop completely automatic:

(1) I took the shots in a vertical (Portrait) orientation to reduce distortion.
(2) I started in Program Mode, and depressed the shutter half-way to let the camera take an exposure reading from the center of El Capitan. Then, I noted the Aperture and Shutter Speed, then I switch to Manual Mode and entered that same Aperture and Shutter Speed. That way, the exposure can't change as I shoot the different frames.
(3) I set the White Balance to Cloudy (if you leave Auto White balance on, the color in some of the frames won't match, and you'll see an obvious seam where one or more of the photos was stitched together).
(4) Once I set my Focus (with Auto Focus turned on), then I turned Auto Focus off (that way, it doesn't change focus as I move from left to right across the mountain.
(5) I made sure I overlapped each photo by at least 20%. Photomerge needs that overlap so it can align the different photos.

That's the in-camera prep work. Then, I started on the left side of El Capitan, and within 15 or 20 seconds, I had taken all 8 shots; shooting one shot, rotating my camera to the right a little bit, then firing the next shot, and so on, until I reached the far right side with just clouds. The reason to shoot so quickly is so that you don't have motion in the clouds.