I agree with Peter and Dave. Get to know 1 or 2 lenses well. For example a wide angle for up close and a longer focal length if you plan to shoot further away. An aid in composing is the panoramic photo facility in many smart phones. I only know the iPhone personally. It doesn't give you 360 degrees but you could take a couple of panos as you turn around through the 360 and than stitch together in the phone using an app like auto stitch.
As you can see from all the posters you can use pretty much any lens. It just depends on what you want to shoot. I personally use my Schneider 28mm XL on my Hasseelblad H3D/Arca Swiss RL3D combo. That's the equivalent of a 20 to 21mm in 35mm format) my 360's are mostly forest panoramics where the subject matter ranges hugely in the shotes. The nearest at times was only 1 or 2m away right up to as far as the eye can see.
I would highly recommend PT GUI for stitching because it's very advanced while easy to understand and if you take the pano correctly there is very little tweaking to be done using PTGUI. It just stitches a perfect stitch. Although there are really cool tools at correcting errors in the stitch. I find PT GUI indispensable.
Because of the proximity of the subject matter and the large depth of field I use a wide angle but very importantly a rectilinear wide angle. The 3 first panos I ever took were taken using a regular Manfrotto head, without correcting anything to locate the point of zero parallax. (I learnt how to shoot panos and what software to use AFTER I shot first 2 the scenes, both on the same trip
) (I also had a Cambo wide DS) The black and white image I'm attaching was very challenging to really completely remove the errors in the stitch and I learnt from my mistakes. I printed this to 2.75 meters wide so it had to be perfect.
Since than I invested in the Arca Swiss RL 3D camera and the Cube head. I also got a monorail so I could slide the camera back and forward. I located the point of zero parallax for my lenses (although I always used the 28mm so far) This is quite easy to do and there a bunch of tutorials online. It just takes 5 minutes. The RL 3D makes things very simple for panos. I just need the monorail because you can remove and rotate the back 90 degrees. You don't need to rotate the tripod head itself.
The cube head also makes my life much easier. You simply level the tripod and than you rotate the top section of the head knowing that you will always be level.
Personally I would suggest using a tilt shift wide angle lens if shooting subject matter that's up close. This way you can shoot close, keep the camera level while look upwards without tilting in the scene so that you don't have a chunk of ground in the shot.
Since changing my technique to locating the camera at the point of zero parallax, stitching is really a doddle and I would recommend doing the same. I have printed up to 6.6m wide and you could take a microscope to the image. AND NEVER HAND HOLD THE SHOT IF YOU ARE SERIOUS ABOUT PANORAMICS!!)
I also shot a wide but not 360 of a sea scene where I managed to seamlessly show the white water. You just need to have simlar patterns in the water as you rotate and PT GUI should do a good job followed by a few tweaks in photoshop, where you may need to layer mask a few bits into the stitched image.
Here is the photo at 6.6m on acrylic
and here it is plus 1 other at 13m wide. These 2 are on vinyl so they're not fine art Lambda print.
I think someone pointed out you don't need to utilize the resolution of the D800. That is dependent on your output. If you are printing large that you do need all the pixels you can get. At these sizes you will need to size up. The less sizing up the better of course.
You can see more examples of the 260 panos
here and
here Hope that helps
