He later freelanced for Life, Look, Colliers, and Woman's Day and other magazines often going on his assignments in his World War II BT-13 plane.
Pinney was wounded while photographing the Normandy invasion ("just a piece of shrapnel, nothing serious"), and later shot pictures of the Yom Kippur War.
He once invested his personal savings in a new television series about a 25-year-old zoologist's adventures, shot 39 episodes and couldn't sell it.
Pinney lived in Sanderson's former apartment, as he had since the divorce, surrounded by artifacts from endangered cultures, an undisclosed number of snakes, and 50,000 aging photographs.
Throughout his career Pinney developed a reputation as the go-to man for expert information on the care of snakes and other reptiles.
During the 1980s and early 1990s the then active duty New York City police officers and now notorious "mafia cops", Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa, routinely gave Roy Pinney the exotic pets they would seize from drug dealers after the arrests they would regularly make.
Over the years Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa gave Pinney several pythons, an anaconda and even a live Galapagos tortoise among other exotic animals.
In 1929 at the age of 18 Pinney became a freelance photographer and journalist for the Brooklyn section of the New York Daily News.
He was also the camera man for a series of animal TV programs for Marlin Perkins, Ivan Sanderson and Arthur Jones.
Later in his career Pinney owned and operated Photo-Library Inc., a stock photography business with nearly half a million photographs on file.
The library included animals, architecture, babies, children, flowers, food, geography, girls, industrial, medical, personalities, romance, scenic views and sports.
In 1944 Pinney became a war correspondent when he covered the D-day invasion of "Omaha beach" Normandy, France for Liberty magazine.
Among the approximately 500 war correspondents covering the Normandy Invasion Roy Pinney at 98 years old was the oldest survivor.
Pinney went to elementary school with and was lifelong friends with Bernard Herrmann who scored Citizen Kane, Psycho, and Taxi Driver.
In 1927 Roy competed in a Boy Scout essay contest to accompany Martin and Osa Johnson on one of their wild-life movie-making trips to Africa, but didn't make it.