A closer view...

Taken with "The Beast": Pentax 400mm f4 lens (outside-bayonet fit). Produced from four 6x7 transparencies stitched together.

The transparencies were definitely taken with a view to stitching. The trick is to get the tripod as completely level as possible and then take the pictures quickly, in a couple of seconds (naturally you use a set exposure, not auto-metering). Levelling the tripod guarantees a minimum of what I call "rollover", a gradual dropping off of the boundaries of the shot, due to compounding tilt in the tripod head as you pan from left to right (or right to left, as I usually do). If rollover is too pronounced, when it comes time to stitch, you find you're missing large amounts of either top or bottom of the usable area. Result? A very wide, very short panorama. Minimising rollover affords the greatest possible amount of usable image area. I check my camera's rollover potential by using something like the horizon as a handy reference: if the space between the horizon and the sky is constant throughout each panning position, you've got a pretty flat field for later stitching.

The shot was stitched together with Photoshop only, by layering each transparency from left to right and then soft edge erasing to transparent. Actually it is easier to stitch telephoto shots together than wide angles: there is less distortion as you pan, making life easy. Before flattening you should also get your levels exactly the same, so they match as perfectly as possible. After flattening some tidy ups are necessary to get rid of obvious anomalies (like waves that end suddenly and start again ten pixels higher).

As this lens is quite a hefty one and causes a lot of shake, the leftmost panel had some ghosting in it from the rig shuddering in the breeze. I very carefully painted out this ghosting with the Photoshop clone tool.

Let me put it this way. If there was a genuine panoramic 6x17 format camera that had a 400mm lens, I would have used that. As there isn't, I had to make do with this stitch.