We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Dan Krauss a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Dan, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.

One of the biggest risks I’ve taken (since starting my business of course) has been to move my business to another state.

I had started my business right out of college, after moving from Ohio to Los Angeles. I had a degree in photojournalism and was hoping to make it as a freelance photojournalist. Unfortunately, I started my career in 2010, following the biggest financial crisis our country had in at least 2 decades. The newspaper industry was collapsing, due to the changing times between print and digital. Most staffers were being laid off, budgets from newspapers cut, and the market being filled with new college students with little experience and veterans photographers, many with a slew of Pulitzers and other awards for their work. Long story short, I stuck it out for about 5 years, with varying levels of success, before pivoting into the commercial photography world.

Switching to commercial photography was a huge catalyst in growing my business and helped me earn much more than I did as a photojournalist. Los Angeles was a great place to start and grow my career, regardless of how difficult it was to get moving. One of those ideas like, “If you can make it in LA, you can make it anywhere.” That saying was always in the back of my mind, especially after 8 years of living in a city that I was increasingly growing tired of.

I had been wanting to move to Salt Lake City, UT for a few years at that point, but I was always nervous about how it would affect my business. It was scary to move to a completely new market and start over again. But after a certain point, I had realized that almost all the work I was contracted for took place outside of LA anyway. I finally hit my threshold of what I could take, and made the move. I figured I would take a hefty loss in earnings to start out, but was hoping the lower cost of living would at least equalize it.

Fast forward a few years… I realized moving to SLC was one of the best moves I could have ever made in my career. As a production company that works mainly in the beautiful, natural outdoors, Utah’s diverse landscapes made my business more valuable to the clients I worked with, and opened the doors into finding new clients. Instead of traveling out of state and out of the country for the majority of my work, I’m very happy that most of the work I do these days takes place inside my favorite state in the country.

Utah has become the home I was always looking for, but hadn’t found yet. I’m happy to say I’ll be staying here for a large part of my life, if not, the rest of it.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My name is Dan Krauss and I am a commercial Director and Photographer, running a full-service media production company based in Salt Lake City, called DanK Haus Productions.

I have spent my life photographing high caliber athletes, musicians, celebrities, personalities, and everyday people around the world, working with a wide range of brands and publications. Some of our favorite clients include The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Red Bull, Yeti Coolers, Toyota and Marmot Outdoor Gear.

While my career started as a photographer, over the years the job requests have grown along with responsibilities and crew sizes. Now, thanks to DanK Haus, we have a full team of creatives that can help clients find their brand voice, help hone their creative choices, as well as deliver full service photo and video production to help their marketing stand out from their competition.

At DanK Haus, we like to operate in ways other production companies aren’t interested in. We get bored easy, so we always try to find new, exciting ways to tell stories and grab people’s attention. We like to shoot fun, engaging, and outstanding content for a wide range of clientele.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

I think if anything has become a meter of resilience in our current world, it would probably be sustaining a business through the rise and fall of Covid, and everything it did to our economy.

I don’t think many would disagree with me on that. If you had any sort of small business and watched the economy come to a complete standstill, completely unexpectedly, I’m sure you’ve got some stories of your own.

DanK Haus had been operating almost a full year when Covid hit the US and stopped everything in its tracks. It was a scary time, and came right at the heals of one of the busiest years of my career. Most brands panicked and stopped doing all marketing, for both financial reasons and the fact that no one knew how to work together in person. Everyone had to adapt and figure out what to do. The government definitely helped get us through the tough times, but ultimately, we had to get creative on how we could still create content for the brands that relied on us. We got creative with small teams, creating work in and around our homes during the lockdown, and tell outdoor adventure brand’s stories without leaving the house. It was scary, and the budgets significantly reduced, but we made some of our favorite work during that time.

Interestingly enough, after a few years of dealing with the ups and downs of Covid and its fallout, we have been very thankful that despite our fears, the business continued to grow to new heights. We have gained a lot of new clients over the past few years, possibly even thanks to how we pivoted and continued to work through some of the bleakest times.

Has your business ever had a near-death moment? Would you mind sharing the story?

One of my favorite stories in my career is the day I went to photograph a rock climber as he attempted to free climb El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. If the reader isn’t familiar with it, El Capitan is a 3,000′ piece of vertical granite, famous for it’s multi-day rock climbs that wander up the face of the monolith. Most people spend 3-6 days climbing the rock, but a few elite climbers have managed to climb it straight up, in a single day.

Logistically, the only way to photograph him was for me to hike all the up the back of rock, which was an incredibly steep over 3,000′ vertical hike, with about 500′ of technical rope work to ascend. I was hiking with a 35lb backpack full of camera gear and water. It took about 4 hours just to hike to the top and find the anchors of where I was supposed to rappel from. When I got to the edge and looked over it, my stomach turned.

I was no stranger to rock climbing and rappelling. I have personally climbed 1,000′ tall routes of intermediate grades and done fine. But there is something very different about looking down 3,000′ and casually hopping on a rope that someone else rigged for you… It was vertigo inducing to say the least, and took me about 45 minutes of psyching myself up to finally put my harness on and descend down the rope.

It was terrifying. I don’t think I had ever felt so alone and helpless if something horrible happened. Especially knowing that the further I went down, the further I had to climb up to get back to solid ground. I was passing tears in the ropes that had been tied back together, which is a very scary thing to do while on rappel, and I had just learned the night before by watching YouTube videos.

Long story short, I met my friend about 600′ down from the top of the rock. He did not successfully summit the rock in 24 hours, but we got some incredible photos of his attempt. All-in-all, the entire mission took about 20 hours from the start of the hike to the return back to the car. It was one of those things that until I got back on solid ground, I had vowed to never do anything like that again. But as soon as we got back to the car, all the fear had subdued itself and we were making plans on doing another adventure like that again soon.      

Contact Info:

• Website: www.DanKraussPhoto.com / http://dankhaus.productions
• Instagram: @dankrauss / @dankhausproductions
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dankraussphoto/
• Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/user4035886