Hemispherical photography

Hemispherical photography is when you take pictures of everything around you, up to the sky, so it looks like you have a big ball of photos. Imagine you are standing inside a giant, invisible bubble and take a photo of everything you can see, up to the top of the bubble.

It all starts with a special camera lens that can capture a really wide view. This lens can make an image in a shape of a dome or hemisphere, looking like half of a ball. After taking a picture, the hemisphere is flattened out and transformed into an image that looks like a complete circle, with the ground in the center and the sky on the outside.

Scientists use hemispherical photography to study how much sunlight and heat plants and forests get from the sun. They use these pictures to understand how much light penetrates down to the lower levels of the forest, how much of it is absorbed and reflected. This helps them to understand how much energy plants absorb and what they do with it.

In short, hemispherical photography captures an entire view of the world around us, from the ground to the sky, for scientists to better understand the world we live in.