Who is this Roy Inman anyway?

Roy Inman is a freelance photographer living in the Kansas City, Missouri area.

His professional photography experience spans four decades and began in the streets of Kansas City, Kansas chasing fire trucks and cop cars, trying to capture a spot news picture for the next day's edition of that city's daily newspaper, the Kansas City Kansan. Still in high school, he also photographed sporting events and feature assignments for the paper. All were compensated at the rate of $2 a print, which included film, processing and time. He also shot for the All-American high school newspaper, the Pantograph.

Later, juggling work and studies, he earned a BS in the advertising sequence of the William Allen White School of Journalism at the University of Kansas, Lawrence. He shot for local newspapers, the Associated Press and Time Magazine. Fortunately for him, those were the years of campus unrest, which fostered demonstrations, marches on the chancellor's residence, and sit-ins (and love-ins) in the administration building and dorms. This was fertile photo opportunity stuff for a budding photojournalist.

A two-year stint at the Kansas City Star as a staff shooter left him with the realization that he did not know all there was to know about documentary photography, so he enrolled in the School of Journalism at the University of Missouri, Columbia. He earned an MA in photojournalism. Two years later, he was back at the Star as the director of photography for the new Star Magazine.

A mid-life crazy in the early 1980's led him to Colorado to open a whole-wheat bakery. "Seemed like a good idea at the time", he says.

After 11 months, two weeks, two days and six hours (counting the minutes, he was), Inman came to the conclusion that baking bread was not his calling. So, back to Kansas City where he has been pursing the roller coaster ride of freelance photography ever since.

Projects have included picture editing and photographing a coffee-table picture book about Kansas City and photographing a dozen others, including House of Belief, with innovative interior designer and author Kelee Katillac, a Christmas Story, Fountains of Kansas City, and others. He has also photographed several calendars and conducted numerous classes on photography and creativity. Clients have included Time-Life publications, Midwest Living magazine, Ebony, Sprint, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and hundreds of other regional and local clients. Personal photographic pursuits now occupying his "free" time include shooting trains and train stations at night with banks of reflectors using multiple flash bulbs. Not strobes, but flash bulbs, which are getting more difficult to find. Another interest is creating and manipulating images using Polaroid Time-Zero film in old SX-70 Polaroid cameras.

And of course, photographing the restoration of Union Station Kansas City.