Jan Erik Moström

I’m a big tea drinker, so I was pretty happy when they bought one of these “fancy water boilers” at work. This makes it much quicker to prepare a cup of tea, and as you can see, I have a pretty big cup to fill.

There is only one problem, to fill the cup I need to hold down the lever until my cup is full. As you might guess, it takes some time to fill the cup, and standing there holding down the lever is pretty boring. It has happened that I’ve boiled some water in the regular way, so I’ve had the chance to do something else while waiting.

So imagine my big surprise when I saw a colleague filling up a big tea pot without touching the water boiler … WHAT ????!!! MAGIC !!!!

— H … Ho … how did you do that?

— What do you mean? Just put the cup there and flip the lever.

— FLIP THE LEVER, WHAT??????

Stupid me, I had never realised that it was possible to flip the lever in the other direction and that locked it in place.

My mind was completely blown away … I was just standing there in chock over this revelation. Do I need to mention that my colleague was smiling at me?

Yesterday I got my new wide-angle lens, new and new … it’s an old second-hand lens (14-24/2.8) from MPB, and it’s a giant piece of glass. Compared to my other lenses it’s “silly big”, I’m starting to get a bit worried if I can fit it in my rucksack!!

Anyway, I went out today to test it and here is my first shot … and it’s going to take some time to get used to this lens. When I took this photo, I could almost touch the sign—I’m not used to that.

I then tried to take some more "open landscape" photos, and it's really different from my other lenses. I was standing right beside a tree, not visible in the photo, and the branches from it were visible in the frame, so I took a step forward and made a second attempt … and the branches were still there. Not until I walked up to the tree you see, it's almost within touching distance, I was able to get the branches out of the frame. This photo is more the kind of photos I expect to take in the future. This one has an obvious flaw … the branches melts together with the background. But what really amazed me was that it felt like I had the camera below the tree … I still got the whole tree in the frame with room to spare.

The final photo was taken with me crouching down right beside the track and the snowmobile passing me just 20-40 cm away.

It was fun to take it out to see how it works, I really need to practice a lot, to learn how to best use this lens. It’s quite different from the other lenses I have for this camera.

Every so often, I wonder if I need a larger working memory. A couple of days ago, we went on a short trip to visit family, since it was a short family trip, I decided not to bring any serious photo gear. Instead, I would just take the GR IIIx (almost always in my pocket) and the Lumix GM5 with the small 12–32 and 35–100 zooms (fits easily in a pocket). My idea was to take a walk or two and try to capture three landscape photos.

Right before we were leaving home, I realized that I had forgotten the 35-100 and ran in to fetch it. Then we left home and after a couple of hours of driving we arrived at our destination.

After eating lunch, I decided to take my walk before the sun disappeared, and I started to dig in my bag to get the GM5. After about 30 seconds, I realized that I had forgotten to pack it … what an idiot I am!!!! So I had the tele zoom but no camera, great !!

Fortunately, I had the GR IIIx in my pocket, so I was able to capture some photos … but not what I had planned.