In our travels, what impresses me about what we see quite often cannot be recorded in a standard aspect ratio (4x3 or even 9x16) photograph.  For example, here is a single photo that I took with my Nikon D5000.

Sure, this gets the basic elements of the scene -- the courtyard, the walkway, stuff in the corner...  But my eye sees a lot more to the right of this scene.  Here is a panorama of the same scene:

I chose this example because it isn't particularly dramatic, yet gets the point of the changed feeling a photo with a wider angle conveys.

Taking these pictures is no longer very hard.  You just have to start thinking and shotting this way when looking at scene.  Here's what I do:

1. Look at the scene.
2. Find the left edge.
3. Take about 3 or 4 images, rotating your body from left to right, shooting pictures close together in time.

When I get home, I use a program named Autopano Pro -- but there are lots of different programs you can use for this.  Here are the features of Autopano I like:

1. Automatic panorama discovery:  You can direct Autopano to look at all of the photos in a directory to find those that make up a panorama.  This works well if use a different directory for each day's photos.  Point Autopano at the photos in a given directory, set it off to discover and stitch, go to bed, wake up in the morning with your panoramas.
   
   
2. If you want, you can also select the photos to be used in the stitching of a wide photo manually.  Sometimes when you have just a few, this is the better way to go.
   
   
3. Autopano doesn't care if your are doing a horizontal stitch, vertical stitch or the more general mosaic stitch where you have moved your camera in both directions.
   
   
4. Finally, if you want to control the stitching settings yourself, you can go as deep into this as you want.  I find that the automated settings serve my purposes.

Finally, I embed a growing collection of such panoramas I have been taking for 10 years as the banner of my blog.  Every time you visit this page, a panorama will be selected at random.