As we were ending a recent visit to the Los Angeles area, and since we were flying out of the Long Beach airport, with about two hours to kill, we decided to make a mad dash visit to the waterfront.  I didn't have my DSLR with me, so with my wife's trusty pocket point-and-shoot, I tried an experiment.

With no tripod available, I carefully took 10 exposures of the Long Beach waterfront from the Queen Mary parking area. I was careful to keep the camera level and aligned with the seawall, overlapping each shot by about one fourth.

I stitched the images together in Microsoft's Image Composite Editor and adjusted color and lighting and ragged borders in Adobe Lightroom. Since wide panoramas are typically too wide to view easily, I have posted it to a web site that specializes in displaying and printing really big pictures, GigaPan.com.

So, here is my 65 mega-pixel picture. For best effect, click on the full-screen icon, then zoom in until the picture overflows your screen and becomes slightly pixelated.  Then, zoom out slightly until the picture gets clear and sharp.  Now scroll left and right and up and down to explore the Long Beach waterfront.