panoramic technique

Hello all, hope you are well, I am off to thailand very soon, we are staying on a island for a few days just off the east cost of phuket, no electeric etc, so ideal for me to walk around and occupy time with the camera, What tecniques would you use, I am going armed with tripod etc All editing taking place upon return to uk as i dont fancy photoshop on a netbook lol

For panoramas I use the camera in portrait mode, and allow about a 20% overlap. Before the first photo in the series I take a picture with my index finger in it, then take the series, and then take another with two fingers in it to indicate the end of the panorama series. Makes life much easier when you get home and start processing all those holiday photos.
I also set the camera to manual to keep the exposure the same throughout the series.
I don't have a panorama head so I am a bit limited in the size of panoramas I take, but they seem to come out OK in PSE6.

As Gwyn advises plus I would add that I go to manual focus too (keeping it the same for each frame).

You can get away without using a tripod too (quite easily in fact provding your stance is consistent as you pan to each frame).

When you are preparing your RAW images for stitching on the PC make sure the white balance is the same for each and obviously as your exposure was locked when shooting if you make any adjustments to one image (exp compensation, highlight recovery etc) you will need to make the exact same adjustment to all the others.

Fantastic Idea thanks, and greytop thankyou for your input very helpfull, so manuel is the key to this then! thankyou

Is it best not to be too wide on the focal length to reduce distortion? I would like to do panoramas too.

What island BTW?

Yes you are right, too wide can cause the odd problem when stitching but is does depend on whether the foreground is busy or not. In this example below the frames were taken @ 16mm and I couldn't spot a problem or mismatch anywhere (again using Microsoft ICE).

[IMG]http://i870.photobucket.com/albums/ab269/Greytop_photos/Stoner%20January%202010/Panoramastitch.jpg[/IMG]

Edit: the only thing I had to do was clone out my shadow

It is Koh Nakha island just on the east coast of phuket.

http://travelingluck.com/Asia/Thailand/Phuket/_1156816_Ban+Ko+Nakha+Yai.html#local_map

Don't use Auto White Balance. It will change as you pan and create uneven colours between frames.

If you shoot RAW that's an easy fix though but for JPG it is a problem indeed.