I have been experimenting more with these little planet images taken under trees. The following two images were taken under the same sycamore tree at different times; one on a sunny day with blue sky and the other on an overcast day with high cloud:
A totally different look and feel to these photos. These were taken quite close to the trunk of the tree underneath the branches the lower of which were spreading out horizontally over my head. At the top of the photos, what looks like the top of the tree is the farthest extent of the lower branches meeting the horizon.
But for both, it was quite a blustery day causing a lot of movement of the leaves in the wind which leads to this technical discussion:
All the images were taken as a 5-exposure HDR set. But the movement of the branches in the wind caused too many ghosting problems that I couldn’t resolve. Hence the processing steps were:
Convert the raw image to a 16 bit tiff, adjusting the exposure, highlights and shadows for the best balance. This is a compromise that leave the shadows a little noisy and the highlights a bit blown in places.
Stitch the tiff files saving the Little Planet as a tiff file (these files are over 1GB each).
Tweak the settings a little and crop.
Save as a jpg file of appropriate sizes.