The idea of using several exposures to fix a too-extreme range of luminance was pioneered as early as the 1850s by Gustave Le Gray to render seascapes showing both the sky and the sea.
In order to provide the required high dynamic range with imperceptible luminance steps, LogLuv uses 16 bits to encode a fixed-point base2-logarithm of the luminance, which allows an EV range of nearly 128 stops.