I love to shoot panoramas.

This image is unusual because it is a vertical panorama. Most panoramas that you see are horizontal -- usually some scenic view. Here, we take a long, upward view of the scene.

Shooting panoramas is easy. You don't need any special equipment, just a little practice. You have to learn to hold the camera straight and level and to move it in a straight line, with each picture overlapping the previous one. Although others advise locking the exposure, I prefer to let the auto-exposure in the camera find the best exposure for each picture in the set.

There are a number of programs for stitching panoramas together, most of them shareware and inexpensive. Most of them will do things like matching the exposure of the individual pictures so that they are uniform. Another feature is the ability to make adjustments so that the pictures fit together properly.

You can locate these programs with your favorite search engine. Some of the fancier picture editing programs already have a panorama stitching feature built in. I use several. Sometimes I have a set of pictures that won't go together properly in one program that will work just fine in another.