@ tickmike.........good advice from roseway about the tripod and the overlap...
One more wee hint that I would suggest, and that is to take your camera off auto mode, and switch to manual exposure. When you pan the camera to take stage two, three etc. the camera in auto mode may just select a different exposure setting for each segment.....a bit more or a bit less sky in the frame, an extra shadow, some water to reflect more light..anything may be there to suggest to the camera that a different exposure is needed for that frame.
You can then end up up with your several frames looking slightly darker or lighter than it's neighbours.
So, set camera to auto and point at first scene....read it's suggested exposure...switch to manual and set that exposure...and keep that same setting for the rest of the frames. Bingo, overall exposure the same across the pano.
Another idea is to switch to manual focus.........if there is no definitive feature in each frame for the auto-focus to lock onto, it will hunt around for something....generally the horizon.....but if there is a strong subject in one or more of the frames it may well lock on that.
So you can end up with the different frames with slightly different points of focus which can and will do odd things to the depth of field.. so that the dof will/may vary frame by frame.
So, set a suitable aperture to give lots of dof (f22 is great) and on each frame manually focus about one third of the way into the scene.
Last idea........unless your camera is mounted precisely on vertical and horizontal planes, any bold straight feature to the front of the frame and in the overlap zone may become distorted if you pan to that next frame but fail to set with the same precise orientation........and a straight pole on one half of the overlap and the same pole sloping in the other half of the overlap will cause a problem when blending the two.
A little three way spirit level...hotshoe mounted and from Jessops for less than a fiver, will work wonders. ( a spirit level built into a tripod is fine if you know the camera body and the lens are always exactly parallel to the tripod head...not a guarantee if your lens if heavy and prone to tilt the camera front down a bit )
The secret about a good pano, apart from the composition is .......consistency between frames.
Enjoy your trip to lovely Devon....look forward to some stunning panos.
