To really capture the perceived beauty of a scene, one shot from the camera just might not do justice. You need to recreate the scene with a panoramic view of it. Our eyes can see almost 180 degrees. My lens at 18mm is far short of the field of view from our two eyes combined. Fisheyes or lenses at 10mm will give us the field of view we want but photo edges are always highly distorted and they are expensive. I think panoramic features of point-and-shoot cameras are great. My D80 does not have such a feature but that is ok.
I was doing interior camping at the Frontenac Provincial Park in Ontario a few weeks ago. To shoot the panoramic scene above, I first used the Aperture Priority mode or one of the other Auto modes to figure the proper exposure settings, then switched over to Manual shooting mode with those same settings. Without a tripod, I panned the scene quickly, shot the scene in 7 small increments.
I just downloaded Hugin (http://hugin.sourceforge.net/) to stich the photos together into one panoramic photo shown above. Hugin did a wonderful job. I selected the photos for it to stitch and away it went. There was no need to tweak anything. The black background that is not part of the actual photos were left in the photo to create an interesting frame around the panorama.
The photo below is the same as the one above except that I played with the curve a bit in GIMP.
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