Making a jigsaw panorama
One of the problems you will encounter when stitching a panorama is that if it's too wide, it's nearly impossible to print. Although it might be 48 inches wide, it might only be eight inches high, especially if all of your sections were shot horizontally. One fun and creative answer to this is to zoom in slightly and shoot multiple decks so that, even after cropping, the image isn't compromised. The following is a photo I shot in Fes, Morocco:
Don't think that you have to shoot on the level all of the time. This is a jigsaw panorama, a random shoot of 37 sections, shot in three decks, from left to right. I really like the fact that although Elements does an amazing job of lining up all of the images near-perfectly, it's not put off by having images at an angle, horizontally, vertically, zoomed in, or in wide-angle settings. It handles such a challenge with ease (although this took 20 minutes to put together...