Hey Scott and Ryno,

You guys are awesome! Thanks a lot for the above posts because they fill in all of the blanks that I have had regarding making my own pano. I don't have photoshop so I downloaded and tried Gimp a while ago (it's amazingly good for freeware, I think it comes with the Mac's too). So, your comments are the perfect combo for me.

Quite a while ago, since I didn't have the index head, I tried downloading some spherical projection panos and then doing the tiling etc just to see if I was able to. I managed to do it but the result was low res and not too great in the program. I had used Gimp as a result of probably Ryno's general suggestions way earlier in this thread but I forced it by turning on the grid and cutting and pasting each tile to new files ... brutal. It hurt my head too.

The comments above make total sense for me so I'll be off to the races as soon as I get time and a good day for the pics. I'm near a great beach which is huge and pretty flat at low tide, so I think it'll go well with the existing ele files. If it works I'll try to post it back here if you're into it.

A couple more questions though:
1. Can you tell me what camera resolution you used for the actual photos?
2. When you took the photos, did you also take one or more straight down and a few straight up? Maybe that's why you had to fill in the blank spots?
3. Scott do you think that you would have got similar final resolution if you took fewer photos or did the more photos help improve the resolution?
4. what was the lens focal length when you took the photos, so that it worked nicely with Autostitch?

Sorry to be a pain, but I'm really grateful.
Thanks again.
Dave