Episode 135 - James Popsys

135. James Popsys

What if the goal isn't to make photography easy - what if the difficulty is the whole point?

Guest: James Popsys. Photographer, YouTuber and author based in Snowdonia, North Wales · jamespopsys.com · YouTube and Instagram: search "James Popsys" (P-O-P-S-Y-S)

In this episode

James has been on my list of dream guests for ages, so I was thrilled to finally sit down with him. We start, as these things do, with lawnmowers and film scanners, before getting into the real story: a marketing job in London, weekend photo walks, a conceptual composite of the London Eye as a bicycle wheel, and a move to Sydney that somehow led to a YouTube channel he started almost by accident in New Zealand. James talks about guarding his own individuality by deliberately not watching other photographers' videos, connecting the dots backwards to find the worldview running through his work, and what it took to commit thousands of prints to paper for his book Human Nature. We get into his one-lens, one-body philosophy, why he thinks difficulty is a feature of photography rather than a bug, and why he'd still rather be surprised by an ordinary place than get the photo 3,000 other people already have. He's off to East Greenland in a few days to experiment with a more hybrid, video-forward workflow, and this conversation is a lovely primer for anyone who wants to know how he got there.

Highlights

[Opening] Film scanners, darkroom chemistry, and a cold open about finding surprise in unremarkable places

[Opening] A very serious digression into battery-powered lawnmowers

[First third] The London Eye as a bicycle wheel, and the Sydney-to-YouTube origin story

[First third] "You can't connect the dots going forward" - finding the worldview that was there all along

[Middle] Making Human Nature: watching the zeroes stack up on a 15-metre printer

[Middle] The horses-through-the-window print, and why James is a "one body, one lens" traveller