The Format Journal-Assignment 1 Roy Cox

The Format Journal-Assignment 1

Date: September 9, 2026

Photo Professional: Roy Cox Studio, Roy Cox

Specialty: Portrait Photography

Location: 12 Emala Avenue, Building A, Middle River, MD 21220

"I never imagined myself as a photographer, and now I can’t imagine myself doing anything else."

- Roy Cox

                                   Roy Cox and some of the camera equipment and staging areas

Objective:

Roy Cox is a professional promotional/commercial/portrait photographer who was born in and still lives in the Baltimore area. His first studio opened in 2002, a small windowless 460 sq ft warehouse space in Middle River. As his photography business grew, he moved into his now 4,200 sf space, still in Middle River, which besides the studio area includes, dressing room, lounge area, office, and hair & makeup room. There are three staging areas, main one and two smaller. There is also room, in another section, to set up special staging projects and a film camera boom for filming videos or wide-angle shots. 

While 65% of his photo business is in-studio, 35% of the business is in the field and at times out of state. Equipment is divided into two categories, one being the stationary camera, lights, backdrops, diffusers, numerous tripods, and props while a separate area houses all the mobile equipment in hard and soft cases for field/off-site photography.

            Samantha-Editorial                  Newspaper-Beauty/Fashion                 Kelly Red -Beauty/Fashion                                                                             Images from Roy Cox Studio

With his focus on “high end promotional and campaign imagery” for portraits there is wide breadth of subjects and business opportunities including individuals, models, artists, actors, bands, sports figures, brands and companies. To date Roy has built a portfolio of over 18,000 people photographed and 1,000 ad campaigns over his career.

With solid foundation and name recognition for promotional photography in the DMV area and beyond Roy has also found time and a personal goal to mentor interns. He strives to impart as much of his career knowledge of portrait photography and firm sense of business acumen to give these interns the strongest foundation possible. 

           Sacred Lox-Beauty/Fashion         Nilah-Beauty/Fashion                      Broken-Promotional

                                                                       Images from Roy Cox Studio

Subjective:

First, I found Roy to be engaging and confident in his personality as he spoke of how his photography and life’s learned lessons, both professionally and personally, were intertwined.

As I reviewed Roy’s website prior to the visit, I was aware that this style of photography was not a career I would seek out. That certainly doesn’t discount the importance of portrait work in the professional realm of Photography.

Yet there was a lot of information that did relate to my learning experience with the camera in manual and photoshop.

I had a smile on my face when Roy mentioned the importance of learning video. I am familiar with videos as I film and upload art diary videos to YouTube. It is not just video as a film tool but learning the editing program. He mentioned DaVinci Resolve and it happens to be the editing program I use.

I didn’t learn video filming for photography, but the knowledge of the editing process allowed me to combine photography images together for this Blog as Blogger/Blogspot does not allow you to place photos side by side unless you learn a certain code format.

I could import JPG images into DaVinci, edit them side by side or other configurations, capture a still shot of the edit and then export the ‘still’ to the class assignment folder to upload into the blog.

Roy also mentioned ‘develop your style’ which I took to heart. As I learn the camera in manual and Photoshop, I am casting a wide net of different subjects to do that very thing, find my style.

Lighting was another key aspect of his talk which I found highly informative as the two staged support photos I’ve included had their share of problems trying to figure out how to light them. His single light answer reinforced my own end-solution of reverting back to using just one light for both photos. Any adjustments to light were completed in Photoshop/Camera RAW.

Questions I had that were answered before I could ask. ISO setting, he used-3000. Was a computer screen set up so clients could see results of the shoot as they took place? Yes, as he showed us the tether stand used for that purpose.

Last thing of note, external hard drives. Roy mentioned his and this should be taken as extremely important as to offset the risk of a computer being hacked and everything on it getting wiped out. Another reason is avoiding using up your computer’s desktop drive space. I have a 5tb external hard drive for my YouTube videos, a 1tb for art and photography, and a 1tb for these Towson photo classes. When I travel with a laptop all photo images are transferred to USB drives or an external hard drive I take with me for backup.

What I was able to learn at the studio will reinforce improving the quality of my creative approach or needed business insight with staging still life photography set-ups and the world of photography in general.

Notes: 

First Note:

My two portrait shots. Since I didn’t have the studio space to set up, I decided to work smaller and with props I could muster around the apartment. I had asked, long-time friend, Miss Rabbit, if she would pose for me. She graciously said she would be glad help out with this portrait project. Not her words exactly, it was more like, yeah, sure.

These are the two. 

Second Note:

While I mentioned portrait photography was not a career goal, that didn’t mean I hadn’t engaged in it and also enjoyed doing it. Below are four shots I took during the Spring semester intro photography course where one of the assignments was photographing people in portrait settings.