Parallax – How important is it really?
VERY! (Well, most of the time it is very important) If you have parallax, most stitching programs will be unable to stitch your images. Calibrating and testing your camera/head/lens setup are worth your time. Moreover, once you find the sweet spot (proper nodal point) you never have to find it again, so it is a one-time setup. However, it also depends on how close the subjects you are photographing are in relation to where you are shooting from. If you are shooting in the middle of a flat field in Kansas (USA), then parallax may not be as important. However, if you are photographing a small room filled with bookshelves (i.e.: a lot of vertical and horizontal straight lines) then it will be absolutely critical to have the correct parallax/nodal point. Side note – Below, you can see that I have successfully stitched a handheld multi-image panorama shot from the Seattle Space Needle, where the nodal point was off by nearly 40 feet! The wider the lens, the more challenging finding the corr
