Little planet with a tree – exposure testing

This is a more technical post although you may wish to just view the photos!

In my last post, I showed a set of little planet images with different exposure methods one of which was a 3 exposure hdr set but even this was not enough to compensate for the large brightness range under the tree.

So I tried a 5 exposure hdr set using a 2-stop interval. This gives an extra 8 stops to the dynamic range. Here are the results:

This is the inverted little planet. The exposures work as there is detail in the sky and the clouds show detail:

little planet inverted

And this is the same image set as a standard little planet:

standard little planet with hole

This was cropped to give a reasonable size to the ‘planet. Uncropped it looks like this:uncropped little planet

The black hole is the ground under the tripod. I did remove the tripod and take photos of the ground but, because I was more interested in the inverted version where it is not required, I didn’t include it in the image stitching. Quite an interesting effect on the branches though…

Just for completeness, here is a version with the ground patched in:

little planet with hole filled

But with this 5 exposure set, there was a lot of wind movement (it was quite a blustery day) which caused ghosting. These are crops showing the ghosting in more detail:

Standard little planet:

hdr ghosting -standard lp

Inverted little planet:

hdr ghosting -inverted lp

In both these versions, the leaves are moving quite a distance with the wind which causes the ghosting.

I now need a still day…

Author: Paul L.G. Morris

I am an amateur photographer whose photography is mostly of gardens, nature and the rural environment. My specialities are close-ups, panoramic views, or a combination of both that I call 'Nearscapes'. I work mostly for my own interest having closed my business PM Studios Ltd.