HDR and Panoramas

I experimented with a view stitching program include Pos Panorama Pro and find it is very easy to stitching things in 1 direction (either horizontally for vertically) but not 2. There are some of my experiments with a free image stitching software:

It is a rather painful process. Firstly, I do not have a DSLR and needs to take more pictures to compensate that. Secondly, I do not have a tool to measure the rotation of the camera. To be save, more pictures are taken. The test above is by stitching 20 photos(!!!). And I also need to take 30 degree up & 60 degree up and 30 degree down & 60 degree down. This makes up to 100*4 exposure = 400 picures!!!!

That makes my end up buying a fisheye for my poor little camera. I get it from Sim Lim for 150 bucks. And this reduced the amount of works I need to do by 5-folds. =P

I dead another test about the HDR workflow tonight. There are some new finding.

1. Do stitching after merge HDR it is impossible to stitch those over/under exposed images together(no feature for the computer to match). 
2. You can unwrap the fisheye image in PS and make it a action for batch processing. You need to crop out the sphere, and ensure your image is square before applying a lens correction
3. There is no single-click lens correction for my fisheye in PS. I used a 8mm lens correction plus some custom adjustment.

after stitching:

Did not adjust the exposure but you get the idea. The image have irregular edges at top and bottom. That seems to be normal after reading this site:Creating HDR Panoramas. So I am not alone. All I need to do is some post processing work described by Farbspiel.

Incidentally, I found a very very very (xn) useful site: HDR tips from Professor Kirt Witte . It talks about how to setup and take HDR images so as to get the best results.