> A “shift panorama” is a very simple panorama as you don’t need any accessories like a rotating plate and you won’t be running into stitching errors
I have a panorama head (Manfrotto 303SPH). It's enormous, weights around 3kg and... I never use it.
In my experience, Lightroom does an extremely good job at stitching panoramas from handheld shots, as long as there is reasonable overlap between shots. Seems to work perfectly every time.
A 30% overlap allows be to basically never have an automatic pano merge fail in LR. Though I rarely shoot panos full handheld, usually still from a tripod with at least a ballhead.
Even better, LR allows you to merge a HDR pano in a single action - which has become an important part of my workflow, because it works so well, and results in a nearly RAW quality DNG that can be edited non-destructively.
With one exception: Multi-row panos with 3 rows, where the top row is mostly sky. Even with lots of overlap, LR usually can't figure this out. But the workflow using tools like Hugin or PTGui is so involved (and requires baking the RAW files first) that I usually just avoid this situation. Besides the fact that it's often not the most interesting composition.
But especially when you're doing multi-row panoramas with long exposure times, preparation is key, and so is execution time.
I often do multi-row HDR panos. With brackets of 3 exposures each, the time for a single frame can quickly add up to 45s or more. In a 3 row, 5 column pano that adds up to a total exposure time of 11.25 minutes - net. This doesn't include the time between frames needed to pan to the next column (or worse, next row and 1st column), making sure you get enough overlap, align everything and finally tighten the tripod head knobs/clamps again.
Depending on the season, the usable blue hour may be as short as 15 minutes. That mean's you essentially get one shot at this.
So any gear that allows you to do that reliably and quickly, for example a panoramic rotator head with indexed degree stops [1], helps immensly with getting good results.
This is an example of a 2x5 "pano" with a 3x exposure bracket (20s, 6s, 2s) I took:
With 20s as the longest exposure, the chance of a car or bus driving right through my shot was huge, so I had to retake many of the frames, some even several times.
[1] For example the Nodal Ninja RD16-II Advanced Panoramic Rotator
My comment was not intended as a dig against that head. It's fantastic at what it does, and does it perfectly well. It's especially useful for zoomable images: take hundreds of shots with a tele lens and assemble them in one picture that one can navigate ala Google Maps. For that kind of image, handheld won't work because one has to make sure not to miss a spot.
But for simple panoramas, handheld + Lightroom is fine.
I have a panorama head (Manfrotto 303SPH). It's enormous, weights around 3kg and... I never use it.
In my experience, Lightroom does an extremely good job at stitching panoramas from handheld shots, as long as there is reasonable overlap between shots. Seems to work perfectly every time.