For those of you that don’t already know, the 2024 Royboy Calendars are now shipping! They’ve been on pre-sale for a few weeks but now they are in stock and shipping out.
2024 Royboy Calendars Now Available!
What’s Your Dream Car?
When I was a kid I spent lots of time doodling. I never got good at art but I sure practiced a lot. I still have a bunch of my later high school and college notebooks for some reason. When I found them recently I came across a whole bunch of my untalented artwork. I drew lots of skulls, flames, band logos (embarrassing) and yes even some cars.
In 1994 I saw my first 1963 ½ Ford Galaxie 500 Fastback. I was in awe, and in love. What the hell was this spaceship?!? This was nothing like any car that I knew at the time. We were in Nebraska at a car audio competition and this car was decked out. J. Bacon was the owner, and a stranger to me at the time.
Hot Rods, Rat Rods & Miscommunication
We label ourselves, our cars and everything else we can so that we can separate ourselves from the masses and claim our own tribes. It’s human nature and I’m a victim/proponent of it too. One of the ways that the label “system” fails us is when the definition of a label changes over time, not everyone gets the memo and then you have people not understanding each other.
Big plans being made!
A group of my Stray Kat brothers and myself are planning a major road trip for next spring. From my home near Salina, KS (home of the KKOA Leadsled Spectacular) to Wichita, KS then Vegas for the Viva Las Vegas Rockabilly Weekend, then to Austin for the Lonestar Roundup and back home. I’ll keep you posted on what the plan is, and of course I’ll blog from the road on that trip. 3250 miles in a bunch of kustoms in various states of build across the midwest and southwest and back. It should be an adventure!
Here’s what I saw on my last trip to Viva in 2010
And here’s this year’s coverage of the Lonestar Roundup.
Looks like a good time to me! See you at a show, Travis
What the heck have I been up to? 5/30/12
Last weekend on a whim I decided to head up to Lincoln, NE to the Hot Rod Supernationals car show.
Here’s a slideshow of the coverage of that event. Lots of muscle cars, street rods and a few traditional hot rods & kustoms. Click the slideshow to go to the gallery and see the entire collection.
The previous weekend was the 30th Annual Atwood Early Rod Run in Atwood, KS. Here’s the slideshow for that coverage. Click the slideshow to go to the gallery and see the entire collection.
This weekend I’ll be off to Marysville, KS for the AutoFest. Here’s last year’s coverage of AutoFest, Click the slideshow to go to the gallery and see the entire collection.
What the heck did I do this week? 4-9-2012
I haven’t posted here in a long time… almost a month. There just hasn’t been much going on.
I did get the honor of spending an afternoon with the Fundamentals club out of Wichita, 9 guys showed up and we filmed a 3 hour interview, talking about kustoms and hot rods and the old days. It was one of the coolest afternoons I’ve ever had.
Other than that March was a month of laying low, saving up some money for Austin for the Lonestar Roundup this weekend. I’ve been busy on Instagram, there will be a few photos below, and there is a 40% off sale going on for all of the 2011 Lonestar Roundup gallery (enter the code “LSRU” at checkout and get any print or download for 40% off, pretty sweet!).
The price on the Best of 2011 book has been dropped again! Have a look at it and the new Instagram Hot Rods Vol. 1 books here.
Some Instagram shots from the last few weeks…
In just 3 days my buddy Mongo and I will be rolling into Austin for the Lonestar Roundup! We’re stoked to get to make this trip, a 2nd for me and a first for him. It would be cooler to be taking the Galaxie but that just wasn’t possible budget wise, but we will be there and I will be wearing out my shutter finger trying to bring you all of the LSRU goodness.
If you haven’t already seen it yet here’s a new hat that came out this week. You can get it in 3 different styles of hats, in tons of different colors. The version pictured has been the most favorite so far but you can stand apart from the crowd by getting one of the other colors.
We’re just under a month away from the Stray Kat 500, so get your registrations in and meet us in Dewey, OK for one of the koolest parties on the planet. Here’s a couple shots of our buddies from Pushrod playing there last year.
Next week I’ll be sharing tons of photos from the Lonestar Roundup so be sure to check back in.
See you at a show,
Travis
What the heck did I do this week? 3-10-2012
Wild week here for Royboy Productions! Saturday I took the new video crane over to shoot some of Jeff Bennett’s Rat built by Calvins Customs in Salina, KS, then I went down to McPherson, KS to film some of the frame construction of my buddy Mongo’s new hot rod pickup.
Right as I was heading for the door, it happened. A flaming ball of metal hit my right eye. No I was not wearing goggles, yes I should have been. After a considerable amount of stinging and quite a few tries at flushing the lil bugger out, I finally got it once I got myself home and I went off to bed.
Three hours later I find myself standing in front of my bathroom sink, not able to open my eyes. Oh crap, I kinda need those. Turns out in addition to the slag hit, I had inadvertently exposed my eyes to far too much UV…yeah I had welders burn. At the time I didn’t know it, I just knew that it was the middle of the night and I could’t see, so off to the ER I went, just to be safe. I had taken precautions to protect my eyes during most of the frame build, but I know me… I got careless when my monkey brain went oh oh oh oh I see what would be a cool shot and I moved myself out of my pre-thought position which was protecting my eyes from most of the UV. Monkey brain cost me a bunch of money that evening, not to mention the pain.
So not much was done in my world for most of the week, the day job took precedence, and I did little more than get the video footage transferred to the computer. There were some Instagram shots here and there like I always do you can follow royboyprods there to follow my shots. A mid week sale on any item in my portfolio and now a sale on the softcover version of my Best Of 2011 photo book.
I know the books are expensive, that’s a byproduct of them being 160 pages and printed by a print on demand publisher. Without investing a few thousand on my part there is just no way to get the price down. I will start producing some smaller cheaper books for folks that want them, keep on the lookout for that.
Right now it’s time to head out the door to Arkansas City, KS to Premier Body & Paint the shot of Jeff Myers to sit down with Jeff and talk about his beautiful Caddy and Galaxie. Both cars are way kool kustoms that are driven, should be a good day! Next weekend it’s off to Wichita to talk with some members of the legendary car club, the Fundamentals about Wichita’s hot rod and kustom history, also should be a very good day.
If you live within a decent drive of Salina, KS and you want a video produced of your kool kustom or hot rod, drop me a note here. I am looking to shoot a few for content on my site and will be glad to give you a discounted price because of it!
Have a great weekend, stay safe, and I’ll see you at a show,
Travis
What the heck did I do this week?
This is the first of what I hope to be a weekly post on here with a quick rundown of what is happening in the world of Royboy Productions.
Last weekend was the 2012 edition of the Park City Chill bike and car show in Park City, KS. I shared some of the photos from that show in a blog post here and you can see all of the photos in the full gallery here.
I’ve been promoting the new Best of 2011 photo book this week. It is available in 3 different versions. Hard cover and soft cover versions are available through my new Blurb store and the downloadable PDF version is available through the Royboy Productions home page.
Sample shot from the Park City Chill Gallery 
No plans for a car show this weekend but I will be shooting a feature for this blog of my buddy’s very cool rat styled hot rod, there will be video and photos coming soon, keep on the lookout!
As always to see any of the 26,000 images from car shows across the midwest go to the Royboy Productions photo gallery, follow my adventures on Twitter, Facebook or subscribe to this blog.
See you at a show,
Travis
Who the heck is Royboy Productions?
Earlier this year it was suggested that I make this whole Royboy Productions thing about more than just the cars. I mean, I love the cars, but there’s more interesting stories in the car owners, artists, car show promoters, bands etc that need to be told. So the idea was hatched to use this blog to tell some of those stories. Rather than mangle someone else’s story this first feature will be about me, I’m my own guinea pig. In future articles I’ll cover a few of my hotrod/kustom friends so use the RSS feed to stay up to date on the newest stories and show coverage.
My name is Travis, I like to take pictures….
What the hell is a Royboy Productions why not just call yourself Travis??? Because I like to be difficult, I guess. The name comes from a time when I was doing audio engineering in the studio and live. I was planning on starting a business that specialized in live recordings. Figuring that nobody else would have used “royboy” as a name for their business, I ran with it, a few months later I built a website to advertise the business.
Just for fun I added the photos that I’d been taking at car shows to the site, and I quickly saw that those pictures got a ton more attention than my recording services. Figuring why not use that to an advantage, the idea of a custom car calendar was born, put the website on it and people will see the url every day of the year! Give all of the proceeds to a charity and give yourself a good feeling…. Hey this could be cool (kool as straykatkustoms would say). Slowly website morphed into what it is now, over 14,000 car show photos all 100% free to view. It’s has been fun, and although I haven’t had studio time besides the annual Bluesmasters At The Crossroads event in a couple of years, I haven’t regretted a bit of this current adventure. See a small gallery of the 2010 Bluesmasters here.
Publisher, we don’t need no stinking publisher!
In 2008 I created the first Royboy Productions Calendar For Charity, with 100% of the proceeds going to Victory Junction Gang Camp for Kids. Looking at the traditional calendar I thought why do we have to do it the way that everyone else does? Why not have 2 photos, with the calendar superimposed above the bottom photo? I hope that this still sets my calendars apart, but they are a work in progress, since the 2010 Calendar they’ve all been printed and bound by me, to keep the overhead as low as possible to raise as much money as possible for the charities. It means 100’s of hours by the time it’s all said and done but the feeling you get when you can donate a bunch of money to a good cause makes it all worthwhile.
2009 brought about the idea of a photobook, like every aspiring photographer. A hardbound book was created, again self published/printed, that book covered 2006-2009. I never sold many of them, but that wasn’t the point, the point was making something. Again straying away from what I’d seen others do (whether that’s good or bad, eh I don’t know) and used a single image as the background for each page with some photos cropped to the shape of the cars, mostly experimenting for the fun of it.
The Car Show Pics books came up next, why not take all of the photos from one show and put them in a small sized “magazine” so people could purchase a keepsake of the show? They are for now a limited run of only 50 copies, because it’s not about making money it’s about doing something different, those books are also going to be available as ebooks soon too. A couple of titles already are, more are on the way, when I get around to it.
Okay, wordy, but we get it, except….why???
People ask why I travel to all of the shows that I do, what drives me to do all of this basically for free? Passion. I have a passion for kool! Kool cars, music, people, there is something…. something often intangible that just makes me exclaim “kool!” I didn’t start this adventure with this end in mind, but it’s the path I am on now. I’m doing my best to document what the shows are like, so that people who miss them can feel like they are there, and the people that are there can look back and see what they might have missed. Maybe, just maybe in 50 years when people look back to see what we were building now, some of these photos will still be around for someone to exclaim “kool!”
What’s next?
2010 tripped the odometer at 7,500 miles traveling to car shows not including a flight to and from Vegas, 2011 looks to double that if gas prices allow. Hopefully I’ll be hitting 20-25 shows in 2011!
In early March a few of the hot rod hoodlums in the Derby, KS area got together and I was allowed the privilege of taking some shots of their rides. I’ll be doing more of these photoshoot parties for sure. Over the next few months, I’ll be creating a couple more Car Show Pics books of shows from last year and early this year, and of course the Calendar for Charity project will be in full swing this year again. The next goal is to get some of the show coverage in magazines that aren’t printed by me!
See you at a show!
Travis
