Pano-rific

For as eager as I was to stitch together a panorama when the D50 arrived, it sure took me a long time to get it together. Everywhere I went, I snapped off twenty pictures, dreaming of the 180° panorama that they would become, and then came home, loaded them into Photoshop and gave up on the panorama after being disappointed with the results (if experience is any indicator, this is not a shortcoming of Photoshop but of the operator). I was finally clued into the magic that is Autostich, the free (for non-commercial use) and simple stitching program. With the default settings, I got unrecognizable output, but I kept toying with it and eventually realized that it didn't understand the vertical orientation of the images I was trying to stich. So I set the image rotation option (I think that's backwards, by the way—I had to use anti-clockwise when what I really wanted was clockwise), turned off auto-straighten and let it rip. The result was, to my eyes, a pretty seamless and distortion-free panorama. I have generated a number of panoramas since then and been similarly impressed, but I'll let you judge for yourself (warning: the files are pretty big, between 200 and 300 kb each):

Shea Stadium | Yankee Stadium | Rye, NY beach | The orchard we visited last weekend