I’ve never had great success with stitching panoramas. I tend to cut corners not stitching using the pano head which I own.

For those who aren’t familiar with it, a panorama stitching head allows you to find the nodal point and then manipulate the camera by a fixed angle around that nodal point resulting in the perfect pictures to use for stitching your panorama.

For me, who likes to shoot in extreme lighting conditions, like sunset, this means a lot of difficulty with the stitching software when I don’t use a pano head.

The first shot is about 5 scenes, each bracketed 3 times, resulting in only a 36 megapixel image (double the resolution of a single shot from my camera) and very noisy at full resolution, but it’s a pretty scene I think I should share. The second shot is a single exposure, drastically underexposed and then pushed up in post processing and with the resulting grain suppressed wonderfully by Lightroom 3.