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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.

This photo was taken near Kaohsiung Station, looking toward 85 Sky Tower. What makes the image especially compelling is how the tower appears near the center of the road axis, framed by dense signs, commercial buildings, and traffic on both sides. Although the shooting location is actually quite far from 85 Sky Tower, the telephoto perspective visually pulls the distant landmark closer, compressing the depth of the street into a strong directional corridor.

This photo was taken last year from North Eye Platform using the telephoto lens on an iPhone 16 Pro Max, with an equivalent focal length of about 120mm. In the frame, Mt. Guanyin appears as a dark silhouette against the remaining glow of sunset, while the city lights gradually come alive below. The winding course of the Keelung River is also clearly visible, cutting through the urban landscape and reflecting the warm lights along its banks.

This photo was taken near Weiyuan Temple, looking down toward the C-shaped coastal curve of Shuinandong. On the left side of the frame, the mountain forms a heavy silhouette against the fading blue sky, while the lights of the hillside settlement stretch toward the coastline. In the center, the long-exposure light trails guide the viewer’s eye along the curve of the road, eventually leading toward the harbor and the dark ocean on the right. What makes this composition appealing is not just the car trails themselves, but the way the mountain, sea, village lights, road, and harbor are all held together within a single view.

In previous articles, we introduced how SimLens can be used to analyze the compressed perspective created by telephoto lenses. However, landscape photography is not only about long-lens compositions. When we want to capture a bridge, road, coastline, traffic trails, and sky within the same frame, the real question is often this: how wide does the lens need to be to include the composition we have in mind?

The sawtooth weir at Liyutan Reservoir is an ideal example of a landscape scene that truly benefits from an ultra-wide-angle lens. From the shooting position in front of the weir, the frame needs to include the flowing water in the foreground, the repeated structure of the weir, the open reservoir surface in the distance, and the surrounding hills and sky. With a narrower lens, the scene can easily feel cropped or incomplete. An ultra-wide perspective, however, allows the entire sense of scale and depth to be preserved in a single frame

Next, I want to share a practical application that combines astronomy with landscape photography: a comet landscape shot I took on October 12, 2024...