Originally posted by navcom If you are going to take several shots and stitch them together, I would strongly recommend picking up a pano head for your tripod. This will allow you to pan your camera from the center of the lens versus the center of the camera. It will make your stitching much neater and more realistic.
If your subjects aren't close, you don't need a tripod or a pano head, though it helps to try to manually rotate the camera around the nodal point of the lens rather than the center of your head. I've gotten good results with parts of the panorama down to 10 or 15 feet away, handheld, even with fairly severe parallax error between frames (e.g.,
http://reidster.net/trips/2008-phantom/rp/1604+joined.jpg.medium).
I second the recommendation for hugin. I've been suffering through manual selection of matching points, with excellent results, but I'm going to give the automated point selection another go the next time I assemble panoramas.
Lastly - depending on your lens, you may want to shoot the frames in portrait for greater coverage.