AvantGuild Member of the Week: Lee Klancher
These are the people in your neighborhood! Have you ever wondered who else is joining AvantGuild besides, hopefully, you? Each week on MBToolBox we’ll highlight one of our valued members and their newest projects. If you’re interested in being featured as a profile, drop a line to the folks at AG membership.Name: Lee Klancher
Age:38
Location: St. Paul, Minnesota
What is your specialty or focus?
I have a couple of focus areas. I take farm and rural photographs for books and calendars, and have been doing that for nearly 10 years. About four years ago, I was looking for a more exciting niche, and starting doing travel adventure writing for motorcycle and ATV magazines. I do a bit of both right now, and that suits me pretty well.
What’s the latest thing you’ve worked on?
A calendar called Farm Trucks, which features working trucks and their owners. I had some of this in stock, and shot about six new images of farmers and their oft-times beat-up trucks. My favorite shot features a Chevy Suburban photographed near Denali (Mt. McKinley, Alaska). The truck has been to the Arctic Circle four times, and has a custom paint job paid for with a six-pack of Old Milwaukee.
What has been your most difficult assignment and how did you deal with its challenges?
In 2002, I was sent to Bolivia to cover a ride known as Caravana. More than 100 off–road motorcycle and all-terrain vehicle riders spend two weeks riding about 1,000 miles of dirt roads and muddy trails through a remote region in Bolivia (we were in the Amazon Basin in 2002). The ride is a very big deal, with national television coverage and hundreds of people in trucks and two airplanes providing support.
The trickiest part of the assignment was setting up the photographs. The ride was a huge logistical challenge, with hundreds of people were involved in each day’s ride, and the Bolivians, were, well South American, so it was mass chaos most of the time. The route was not well-marked, so I couldn’t go always out ahead and take photos. Plus only a few people spoke English, and my Spanish is terrible, so when announcements were made about what was taking place, I couldn’t always understand what was said. I learned to watch the leaders, and when they took off, ride the motorcycle I was loaned for the trip as fast as I could until I found a spot I liked, and stop and shoot.
To make matters more challenging, I crashed my motorcycle and hurt my ankle pretty badly on the second day. I was treated by a veterinarian who was along on the ride, and told my ankle was “fine” (I later found out my tibula was fractured). The injury was pretty painful, and I had to take a couple days and ride in the airplane accompanying Caravana to rest up. After two days of that, I knew I had to get back out there to get the photographs and the story. I wedged my swollen ankle into an over-sized boot and was able to finish the ride. I couldn’t ride a motorcycle with the bad ankle, but I was able to ride an all-terrain vehicle (ATV). I recruited one of the Americans to ride with me, and took a bunch of photographs of him. I also found one of the Bolivians who spoke English and was a good rider, and shot some nice film of him.
I came home with good film and a great story to tell. I think it’s Tim Cahill who says the worst trips make the best stories, and that assignment definitely drove that point home for me!
What’s the best or most helpful thing that an editor has told you?
As a photographer, the best advice came not from an editor but from going on assignments with an outdoor photographer, Paul Stafford. He had a great sense of light, and always got up before the sun rose to get shots bathed in early morning light, and then shot until late.
I’ve learned a ton of techniques since then, but nice light remains the single most important ingredient for my ideal photograph.
What’s the worst writing or freelancing advice you’ve ever gotten?
In college, I sent an unsoliticed story about canoeing the Boundary Waters to a small magazine. I talked about how much my buddy and I missed drinking beer while out there. The editor sent a nasty letter back, suggesting writing about beer drinking was entirely inappropriate for publication. Thankfully, I didn’t listen to her, and some of my favorite stories are all about going to great lengths to drink beer (traveling 100 miles across the Colorado wilderness to visit a brew pub, for example).
How did you get into writing/producing calendars? How can others interested in it break into that market?
All of my calendar assignments have come pretty organically, as they were based on work I was already doing. The most recent, Farm Trucks, is a bit of a departure from that, as I shot more than half of that especially for the calendar. That’s also probably the strongest photographically, or at the least it’s my personal favorite.
If you want to get into shooting calendars, you need great film first and foremost. Shoot, shoot, shoot–you aren’t going to get an assignment until you can show some film that really knocks the socks off the editor.
Also, take the time to develop a niche, and do some research on what’s out there. Look to your own experiences and background for a niche that suits your talents. Once you have some ideas what fits for you, spend a little time at Calendar Club looking at what kind of similar calendars are being done, or check out places like Browntrout that have calendars on almost anything. in.
If you can find either a unique take on a popular subject or find an interesting topic with a group of people interested in it (Bolivian Goats on Decks, for example is unique but has limited appeal!) that hasn’t been done in a calendar, you may have a winner on your hands.
And once you have good film and a bit of knowledge, find some publishers that your calendar might fit and start sending sample photos and a query. That can be frustrating, as you may get a lot of rejections, but keep at it!
Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our 
