"It was the science fiction scale of the towers that for many delayed serious understanding of the attacks during the morning of September 11. The first televisioned images, illustrating a report that an airplane had crashed into Tower One at the World Trade Center, showed a blackened crack and wisps of smoke issuing from the upper floors. Cameras had been set up miles away so that the top of the structure could fit the frame. The photographic distance from the buildings, and the medium lenses used, distorted the gravity of the fire. The towers had, in effect, been shrunk to accomodate the format. Only with a telephoto lens, or after some quick multiplication of the data coming through the screen — a small black crack at the top of a building the size of the World Trade Center actually meant a huge three-floors-high-sixty-foot gash — was the impending catastrophe apparent. Then the second plane struck."

Richard B. Woodward, "Afterword", in Kevin Bubriski, Pilgrimage: Looking at Ground Zero, p. 91.