Images were taken with the camera in portrait mode (turned 90 degrees). Five images were shot handheld from the same vantage point, overlapping about 30-50% as I swiveled my body and held the camera in the same plane.

Before I could merge them in Elements I had to rotate them and save them. Then I went to File/Photomerge and browsed for the 5 images. Elements could not join 2 of the images but told me I could drag them into place, which I did. Once I did them Elements merged them quite well. There were some dark areas in the sky which I cloned out.

Since it was a gray day, the sky was pretty much pure white. I used the Magic Wand to select it and then use a color to transparent gradient and draw a line across the image to fill in the selected area (after having chosen a sky colored blue for my foreground color.)

Finished by reducing the picture to upload to pbase and then did a bit of unsharp masking and contrast improvement. Select/All/Edit/Stroke produced the black line around the image.