I tried a vertical panorama of a tree today and learned some things. Even turning the white balance to a specific setting, and turning the automatic focusing off, I still ran into problems. My dynamic range was blown in the last picture on the top. This caused the tree itself to go almost black. So when I tried to recover the bark, the picture turned very grainy and noisy.

So, for the next time, I will take a set of multiple exposures for each position in the range. And the aperture will be fixed so that the depth of field will not be compromised.