Portrait of a mountain

This image was taken during my travel to China this May, to Sichan province of China, using several images stitched made from Canon 5D II + EF 100-400L, setting at 400mm. Mountain in the picture is Xian Nairi, considered a holy mountain, more on here.  Of course one may use a wde angle, in fact, because of such distance between myself and the mountain, may be a normal lens will also do - except the finished image will be a lot smaller, and if to crop it, become even smaller. 

The modern technology has allow many useful and powerful tools to make images, with lots of choices and flexibility.  For picture such as this, my approach is always to shoot a succession of images, with longer focal length of lens, to compress the image as to take portraits, and later to stitch them together, so this way I get better perspective of the subkect, higher clarity of detail, and much larger file.  

This approach may not be preferred by many, because not all the time the larger file size is preferred, and also it is more time consuming.  SONY's handy "Sweep Panorama" is a wonderful choice as well, except it is at the moment only produce smaller file (even automatically stitched, and JPEG only), it is sure enough for many, I use often with my NEX-5.  But when I have a choice, I would go larger file, especially for the perspective of the image.   And what's the difference?  One may argue that put the pixel peeping aside, does a crop image differed from one shot at longer focal length lens?  To me it is.  To me, a wide angle lens stretch the vision,  resulting the object appeared to a little further away while a tele-photo lens compress the image, as it is closer, which I prefer to have the mountain appeared to be closer, as it is a portrait.