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Background  Hemispherical photography (HP) is a popular method to estimate canopy structure and understorey light environment, which analyses photographs acquired with wide view-angle lens (i.e. fisheye lens). To increase HP accuracy, the approaches of most previous studies were to increase the preciseness of exposure and thresholding of photographs, while ours quantified effects of canopy properties (gap fraction and length of sky-canopy border (SCB)) and errors of exposure and thresholding on the accuracy of HP.    Results  Through analysing photographs of real and model canopies, it was showed that HP inaccuracy resulted from the mismatch between exposure and thresholding rather than exposure or thresholding errors alone. HP inaccuracy was a function of the SCB length and the extent of exposure and thresholding errors, but independent of gap fraction.    Discussion  In photographs, SCBs are recorded as grey pixels which greyness is in between that of sky and canopy pixels. When there are exposure and thresholding errors, grey pixels are those prone to be misclassified in image analysis. Longer (vegetation with taller canopies) and wider (lower image sharpness) SCBs in photographs can both result in a higher amount of grey pixels and ultimately higher HP inaccuracy for a given extent of exposure and threshold errors.    Conclusions  Using lenses with view angle narrower rather than that of fisheye lens can shorten the SCB length in photographs and in turn reduce HP estimation inaccuracy for canopy structure and understorey light environment. Since short SCBs and low levels of exposure and thresholding errors can both result in low HP inaccuracy, to identify the true performance of new exposure and thresholding methods for HP, photographs recording canopies with long SCBs and acquired with fisheye lenses should be used. Because HP inaccuracy in a function of the amount of grey pixels resulting from SCBs, the amount of these pixels in photographs can be used as a universal parameter to quantify canopy properties influential to HP estimation and in turn make cross-study comparisons feasible.    Electronic supplementary material  The online version of this article (10.1186/s40529-018-0235-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Sky-canopy border length, exposure and thresholding influence accuracy of hemispherical photography for complex plant canopies