Thanks for your "heretical" comments with great context to support them, we need more of this kind.
Many like their wide angle (or pano) landscape images to include some prominent foreground objects to emphasize scale and distance. My understanding is that pano heads can help stitching this kind of shots. Do you happen to have more such examples to demo no pano heads are needed?
As an aside, there are quite a few tutorials on how to build you own pano heads.
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The very fact that you're asking for another shot above means that I didn't need a pano head ;-)
I know I could have done better on the example image, shooting the ground right in front of me, but because even with 8 GB of RAM loading a 3GB photoshop image takes a while, I was lazy. But here you are:
This is a crop of an image (jpg transfer is pretty dark from ProPhoto RGB unfortunately) where I used a nikon d200 with a 50 1.4 shooting the ground about 4 feet in front of me from 56" high or so, with a regular ballhead. This represents about 4 frames, downsized, out of a 2-row 16 frame each with about 1/3 overlap (low light low detail shots are harder to stitch some times) between shots and rows.
I realize that it is hard to tell, but in my original post there are two tall grass reeds which were 3 feet from me. They are blurry.
In the original posts' shots they are present in about 8 frames. Each frame has them in a different place, because I was not using an "omni-pivot" type of panoramic head, so the camera was rotating about the film plane (i.e. the L-bracket was clamped into a regular ballhead) rather than the nodal point (or entrance pupil for the engineer types ;-) ).
If you use regular PTGui stitching, or any other type (i.e. have looked at photoshop etc. . ) you will end up with the lower part of those grass reeds all disjointed and indeed many copies of them side by side in an obvious kind of parallax effect. For an example, see this page ( [a href=\"http://smartblend.panotools.info/]SmartBlend[/url].
The reeds will look like that pen, if not worse because this is a multi-row, so the bottom reeds will actually be detached from the second row, etc. .
Now, the smartBlend plug-in decides where to put the seams to eliminate that kind of effect, obviating the need, in MOST cases, for the $1000 pano head.
However, if you get very serious, and need to sell, or print very large, go ahead and invest in RRS, as it will require the software to do less work, and by extension you to do less work, and by extension, your world will be brighter, happier, and so on.
The very fact that you're asking for another shot means that I didn't need a pano head ;-)
But don't believe me - the software is free to download and try, and may take a little bit of effort to learn, but you can take shots enough in your own house to convince yourself of how it will work for you or not.
Please enjoy!