SimLens Update: Landscape / Portrait Switching Now Supports Accurate Portrait Focal-Length Simulation

In landscape and aviation photography, focal length is never just about “zooming in.” It affects the angle of view, the sense of compression, and the visual relationship between foreground, subject, and background. In the past, when using SimLens to recreate a photo, landscape-oriented shots were usually straightforward to match. But for portrait-oriented images, the horizontal field of view changes because the camera is rotated, making focal-length reconstruction more prone to error.

Today, SimLens officially adds a new Landscape / Portrait switching feature. Photographers can now choose the actual shooting orientation before simulating the scene with a main viewpoint and reference points. This may look like a small UI addition, but it is especially important for telephoto and super-telephoto compositions, where even a slight mismatch in field of view can noticeably change the result. For portrait-oriented shots, using a landscape-based simulation could easily lead to an inaccurate focal-length estimate.

For this test, I used one of my own photos taken near Rongxing Garden, looking toward the flight path of Taipei Songshan Airport. In the image, a Japan Airlines aircraft passes through a dense urban frame of market signs, traffic, umbrellas, and street activity, with the green hillside compressed into the background. The photo has a very strong telephoto compression effect: the aircraft, street signs, buildings, and mountain backdrop all appear visually stacked within the same frame. If the focal length were even slightly off, the aircraft’s size, position, and relationship to the street would look noticeably different.

With the new portrait mode in SimLens, I was able to reconstruct the viewing angle from Rongxing Garden toward the Songshan Airport approach path and set the simulated focal length to 340mm. This matches the shooting information shown on Flickr, which also indicates that the original photo was taken at 340mm. In other words, this update is not simply about adding an orientation toggle. It allows SimLens to more accurately reproduce the actual horizontal field of view of portrait-oriented photos, improving the reliability of focal-length estimation and composition planning.

For landscape photographers, this means portrait-oriented telephoto shots can now be planned with much more confidence. Whether you are photographing aircraft approaches, compressed cityscapes, mountain layers, sunset alignments, or distant landmarks framed between streets, bridges, and buildings, SimLens can now get closer to the real shooting result. This is the core goal of SimLens: helping photographers turn an imagined composition into a verifiable and repeatable shooting plan before they even leave home.