Irm - what camera do you use for these, what lens/focal length (35mm equivalent), and do you use a tripod or is it all hand-held? They're all most impressive.

Peter - I shoot a Nikon D300. The BZ panos were shot with a 18-200mm lens (27-300). At the time I did not have my 10.5mm fisheye (15.75) yet, which is what I use now for all my panos (6 shots as opposed to 34). I use a Nodal Ninja pano head, PTgui and pano2vr software with a Manfrotto ball head tripod.

Nice. How do you find the D300? It came out not long after I bought my 5D, though I'm now hooked on FF and would have to go for the D700 if I were to jump ship.

How precisely do you have to make each shot? Or do you shoot relatively approximately and do all the real work on a computer?

I noticed quite a lot of vertical curvature when a vertical line wasn't in the middle of the picture. Is that normal and inevitable?

I like D300 a lot. The pano head has click stops for precise shooting (20%-30% overlap). At 18mm there are 10 clicks round then for up /down there are degree markings (18mm = 10 shots round x 3 rows 2 up, 2 down 34 shots total). For my 10.5 it's 5 round plus 1 up. There are different detent rings or settings for different lenses. The curvature in the still is probably the software rendering 360 x 180 degrees into a normal perspective. It can be corrected, but you would have to discard portions of the image. Most of the time I spend goes into the VR so the still is pretty much un-tweaked. It is possible to shoot hand held as long as there aren't any object right in the foreground. Ideally for hand held you'd want a circular fisheye and do three shots total. That's where the FF comes in handy.