Photos taken from the plaza looking up at the Twin Towers are famous for creating a dramatic, vertigo-inducing visual effect. Standing directly at the base of the buildings in the Austin J. Tobin Plaza and pointing a camera straight up completely warped a person's sense of scale. Here is why those specific silhouette photos look and feel the way they do: 1. The "Canyon" and Convergence Effect When you look straight up from the center of the Plaza, the two massive, parallel towers seemed to lean inward toward each other. In photography, this is called lens convergence or a forced perspective. Because the towers were so close together (enclosing a 5-acre plaza) and so tall (over 1,300 feet), looking up made them look like a massive canyon of steel closing in over your head. [2. Striated Steel Creating Textural Silhouettes] The towers weren't smooth glass; they were wrapped in thousands of narrow, vertical steel columns. When photographed from below against a bright sky or a sunset, these columns created a stark, ribbed silhouette. The camera would expose for the bright sky, turning the immense buildings into sharp, dark geometric blocks textured with fine vertical lines. [3. Vanishing Points] Because the buildings were perfect rectangles with no setbacks, they didn't taper as they went up. In a straight-up photo, the hard edges of the silhouettes act as leading lines that rush toward a single "vanishing point" in the sky, making the towers look infinitely tall, as if they never end. [4. High-Contrast Backlighting] Whether it was the midday sun glaring directly between the two structures or the twilight sky glowing at dusk, the backlight naturally cast the structures into deep shadow. Photographers loved this perspective because it juxtaposed the heavy, dark weight of the architecture against the open, moving clouds of the sky. —————————————————————- #WorldTradeCenter #TwinTowers #WTC #originalwtc #nycskyline - @wtc_designs