Panzerwrecks 11 and the Shape of Things to Come

No matter how good an original photo is when we first come across it, we always try to make it better during production. You have no idea how much work Lee puts into removing scuffs and stains and tears and tape. (Photos we used in PW8 originally had rusted staples in them, and Lee made them magically disappear!) The wonderful AMC photos in ‘Repairing the Panzers’ needed to be given plenty of white space and room to breathe to showcase their incredible detail, whereas the photos from manuals were clustered closer together for maximum impact. ‘Panzerwrecks 11,’ presented new challenges: The cover had to be revised to accommodate double digits, and several panoramic photos would suffer if confined to our normal 280 mm page width. As you can see by the sample pages, to deal with these opposing concerns we reduced the typeface and added gatefolds. But at heart it’s still a ‘Panzerwrecks,’ where the images come first. It’s still about bringing together photos from disparate sources and making them into a coherent, well-rounded presentation, and it’s still made possible by a bunch of guys chipping in to hammer out unit identifications, match up vehicle locations and add context and background (aka ‘facts’) to our captions. So, if you haven’t done so already, check out the sample pages, and imagine the rest. More close-ups, more details, more walk-arounds; 128 photos in all to take us into 2011, where our most ambitious publishing schedule to date awaits your purview.

Stay tuned, stay Wrecked.