With a good digital camera, a stand and a 'fish eye' lens you can collect images that represent hemispheric data (canopy openness, leaf area index and photosynthetic active radiation under forest canopies). There are a number of options for the analysis. In R HemiphotR library seems very user friendly (https://github.com/naturalis/Hemiphot or on CRAN).
Article Hemiphot.R: Free R scripts to analyse hemispherical photogra...
Gap Light Analyzer (GLA): Imaging software to extract forest canopy structure and gap light transmission indices from a true-color hemispherical (fisheye) photograph.
CAN-EYE: is an imaging software (Windows) used to extract the following canopy structure characteristics from true-color images (either acquired with a fish-eye or with a classic objective).
HemiView: The HemiView canopy image analysis system processes the image data file to obtain information about the canopy structure.
CIMES-FISHEYE: It is a package of free programs for the analysis of hemispherical photographs (HP) of forest canopies, to extract key canopy attributes like solar radiation indices, leaf area index, canopy openness, etc. These programs offer a unique set of features for film and digital hemispherical photography