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A good rule of thumb is to never shoot slower than your focal length. For example, if you're shooting at 24mm don't go below 1/30 (1/20 being too slow). If you're on a 200mm, try not to shoot below 1/250. This is of course a general statement and does not take into account skill, balance, weight of camera, hand positioning or caffeine intake ;) This info ...

They can all be decent guidelines. In general, ignoring the focal length doesn't make a lot of sense though since it is always going to magnify shake. A lot of other factors come in to play though and these are just rules of thumb. If you have any kind of image stabilization it will throw these off. Also, some people are much more steady than others. ...

A panorama head is the most useful when your panorama includes both near and far objects. The reason for this is that the effect of rotating accurately around the nodal point becomes more important if your objects are near. The second reason for panorama heads as I see it, is that older software (10 Years ago-ish) did not include the possibility of ...

A panoramic head on a stable tripod allows you to rotate the camera around the nodal point of the lens. This has the effect of making it appear each shot was taken from the exact same spot with no change in perspective. It is especially effective with lenses that have no barrel or pincushion distortion at normal focal lengths of around 50mm. For a ...

A big reason is that it just makes getting the shot sequence consistent and accurate. In general, you're looking to keep the vertical plane level through the whole sequence and move along the horizontal plane in smooth, even, steps. A panoramic head is simply going to make that easier to do with less effort and risk of a muffed shot at all kinds of focal ...