i’m very excited to have Troy House on board today to delight us all with his photography insights. This man has shot the Snuggle bear, my friends. And he’s going to to tell us about it. Without further ado…

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I really love the feel of your imagery. You seem to have a unique knack for creating a light, bright, nearly otherworldly feel. Or maybe otherworldly is the wrong word- your images feel “clean”, scrubbed of every day soot and left gleaming and beautiful. This seems to lend your work ideally to the dreamy lifestyle category. Is this the way you’ve always shot? How did you develop this style, and do you employ any tricks to create the effect?

I actually started as a studio fashion photographer. The first 5 years of my career, the only time I saw the outside of a studio was on my way home. Later, I started shooting more on location. When I started showing that work it wasn’t long before everyone thought I was a location guy. I started taking personal pictures on these fashion trips and started showing it and soon I was getting hired for that more than fashion. It was never a conscious decision but one that I have never looked back from. Being prepared and tenacious is my trick. 80% of what I do is in camera.

I see in your bio that your parents were in the business of photography as well. How did this help you choose your career, and what was their work like?

Actually this had me running from the business. My father owned a small town portrait studio on Main Street USA with pictures in the window. All I knew of photography was that and I knew it wasn’t what I wanted. I tried to make it as a painter but eventually moved back to photography, I just never did weddings. Once I realized what else you could do with photography, I knew it was for me. My father sold his studio when I was 14 so I didn’t work there when I had really started shooting but it was great to have an expert on speed dial to call with all those photography questions.

You say you’ve assisted great photographers; do you think assisting is crucial to a young photographer’s development (and do you have any awesome assistants we’ll be hearing from one day)?

I assisted great photographers but I hate naming names. The experience for me was invaluable as I was very young and it gave me time to mature as well as watch people at work. The one thing I warn all assistants is, you are only learning the photo end of the business, which is the easy part. Learning how to run a business is actually more important but something you don’t see on a set.

As to ex assistants, I have had some great ones that I am very proud of. I currently have a young guy that works for me named Patrick Kolts whose work is very impressive.

Attached are two images I absolutely love. Can you tell us the stories of how they were made?

The pool photo was taking in Turks and Caicos for Harpers Bazaar Australia. It was dusk and I saw a workman walking on the back ledge and I asked a waiter if she would do the same.

The fishing story was taken last year for a hotel client advertising things to do near their property in Aspen. We tried out several locations but I felt they all where too busy and expected. I asked our fisherman to get into some faster moving water as I thought it would be more interesting and he said that you would never fish there. Sometimes the best photos lie a little.

Have you had any long term client relationship you truly value? Any you want to talk about?

Every client hopefully becomes a long term client. What you realize after you have been around a while is there aren’t as many clients in the world as you thought there were. So if you can’t turn clients into repeat clients, you will work through that pool pretty quickly and find yourself not working.

Tell us about your Snuggle ads! I’ve always been intrigued by that Snuggle bear, he was a mainstay of my childhood. How did you approach that project?

Snuggle was one of the greatest projects of my life. It was a few years ago with AD Shawn Kelly at Lowe. We shot it all in Rio as they were shooting the TV spots there as well. The comps called for Black and White so we shot film instead of digital. The client would not be attending so every night we would call with updates. The problem was, it rained every day we were there and the project was called Sunkist Breeze. We would call back and say, “we shot in the rain and have great work but we don’t have sunny images”. They kept extending our shoot and we kept shooting.

Finally we had 2 hours of sun and jumped on the plane home. Every image here was taken in the rain. It was actually fun hauling the snuggle bear everywhere because he is a worldwide icon.We would have huge crowds gather around calling out his name. He actually has different names in different countries. In Brazil they would call out,”Fofo”! This bear was actually very heavy as he was mostly metal on the inside. Now they have switched to cgi so no more Snuggles on set.

What’s next for you in 2010?

Lots of personal work. I have a few projects I am researching at the moment. I am also playing with moving images as well and working on how to translate how I see to the moving image.

See more of Troy’s work here.