While I realize I am extemely green in this area I can say I absolutely love Windows Live Photo Gallery's panorama plug in. I've found premiere to be too clunky and unreliable personally. Inkista has the gist of it though.
- TRIPOD- As obvious as it sounds this is your best friend
- Shoot portrait not landscape - It's a lot more photo's but I feel like it's better coverage
- Take a notebook and graph paper, pencil and ruler. Since this is a big project set up your rule of thirds on the graph paper and create a plan. I'm not really that good at explaining but I'll try. Place the middle line of your thirds diagram on the horizon. Place the upper limit at least one full shot above the castle's highest point and the lower limit about equidistant. The reason for this is to have room to crop and edit down to your final product.
- Overlap - Once you have your shots planned out overlap them as you move ONLY the tripod's horizontal travel. As has been mentioned over shoot. The more shots you have the more choices you have when editing.
I have a few of my panorama's up on my flickr site. They definitely aren't as good as I hope to get but I am pretty proud of them. Remember when doing panorama's you have more than just the horizontal to work with. One of my pictures is of the largest Sequoia in Sequoia National park and consisted of 28 photos. (I'm between 150 and 200 yards away from the base of the tree here)
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3650/...be26d989_b.jpg
Hope that helps some.
Doug