MicrostockGroup

I wouldn't think you would change any settings at all.

I use manual focus and don't change it.  There is another way to do them that I keep meaning to try.   Not sure if a David Hockney style would work with microstock though.http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/hockney/hockney.pearblossom-highway.jpg

It's easiest to meter for the entire scene and use those settings for each individual shot. Doing this makes it a snap to manually stitch the images together. If you don't have a light meter, you can take a sample shot using a wide angle lens and use those settings when you switch to a different lens. Having a levelling head is very helpful as well.

Although the convention is to keep the same focus distance for each shot in the pano, you might get some interesting results by varying the focus distance as you pan - particularly if there are two points of interest in the shot.

As an alternative to manually stitching, you may want to try some automated software.

Regarding your 'high enough aperture' statement: you should learn about hyperfocal distance, as well as limits of acceptable sharpness. If, for example, you shoot a scene using 35mm at f/8 focused at 20m, everything from 4m to infinity will be in focus. Just because your lens can be stopped down to f/22 doesn't mean that you need to (or should ever) go there. Lenses are typically at their sharpest when stopped down 2 or 3 stops - by using this knowledge together with the above to strategically select the focus distance, you will have the sharpest and in-focus image possible.

'Urro,

I've shot a few some large panos for customers, recently using digital SLR and MF film in the past.  Always used manual settings for focus and exposure.

For exposure I take some spot meter readings (external meter, not the camera) of the brigher areas in the intended 'image', and then go down 2.5 stops from the average of those.  For focus I use hyperfocal distance as per Sharply's comments.

I do about a 33% overlap, based on Mk1.0 eyeball measurement through the viewfinder, and I've got a spirit level in my tripod head with an offset plate to get the point of rotation at the optical center of the lens, rather than the film plane, which fixes some of the weird overlap issues..

I stitch them using Hugin, which is a front end for panorama tools.  In the film jobs I used to get them drum scanned and muck around in Photoshop or Gimp (Depending on my mood) lining them up and creating layer masks to blend them together.

Cheers, Me.