A lot of us spend most of our photographic time in a 4:3 or 3:2 image format or something close to those, but of course, there's an entire different world awaiting you when you make those ratios a bit more extreme. This excellent video will give you some helpful tips for better panoramic images.
Coming to you from Craig Roberts of e6 Vlogs, this great video talks through some very practical tips and tricks for creating better panoramic photos. As Roberts mentions, although all the ordinary rules of composition apply (having a strong foreground element, etc.), just by virtue of the shape of a panorama, your viewer is very likely to take it in rather strictly from left to right, particularly since it might not fit completely in their field of view at a comfortable viewing distance. As such, you have to be particularly careful of not just the placement of elements of interest as they relate to depth in the photo, but also as they relate horizontally. At the same time, that's an opportunity to create especially compelling leading lines, as their extra length strengthens their impact on the image. Give the video above a watch for more helpful tips.
Well, I agree with his comment about Lightroom stitching. It is very good at stitching, but it also has its quirks. I'm currently working on a Panorama that lightroom has got some stitching errors in the foreground that I was able to fix by stitching in PTgui, but then I found PTgui had stitching errors in the sky, so I'm now merging both panoramas as layers in photoshop to create the original. And yes I have a proper nodal setup on my tripod.
In other words, Panoramas are great, but when stitching doesn't work, they really do suck lots of time to make them work.
As for composition, it's a really tricky challenge to master shooting digitally, because you can't see in one frame what the final image will look like, I'm still very much learning how to setup this aspect.
I love panoramas! If Lightroom will stitch right out of the gate, I run with it and save time. But I typically shoot multirow and much larger than 512MP, and thus beyond LR's capability. I usually align with PTGui and blend with both PTGui and Photoshop, then mask between them for the best of both, since each will blend things slightly differently. For skies and clouds, I often find using PTGui's feather slider works well on the soft side, and mask it in Photoshop with the rest.