Jan Erik Moström

I just want to tell people that this summer I’ve mostly experienced temperatures between 8-18 degrees, warmest has been 23-24 degrees. I prefer this much much MUCH more than the temperatures in southern Europe.

In 2025, I went to the UK (London, York, and Yorkshire in general) and when the trip first came up, I thought that I would bring my Z6 III with two or three lenses. But a week before leaving, I decided ”Nope, I’m just going to bring my Ricoh GR IIIx”. Since I’m not going back there anytime soon, I was a bit nervous since I wanted to capture some good photos. But, it wasn’t a photo trip, it was a trip to meet some friends and do some work. However, based on previous experiences, it would be too much of a hassle to bring a ”big” camera. My guess was that a small, light setup would be much better for the trip.

And it turned out I was right, it was wonderful to walk around in London when it was 30 °C and only have to carry the GR IIIx. And the same thing happened when I went to York/Yorkshire, I certainly missed some photos because the lens of the GR IIIx didn’t have the reach. But I think I lost more photos due to the lens not being wide enough. But all in all, I was very satisfied with my choice of camera, the advantages far outweighed the disadvantages.

This year we all decided to meet in Iceland, I’ve never been there before so I didn’t know what to expect. I had, of course, seen all of these fantastic photos from Iceland, and numerous videos on YouTube. So once again I was thinking of bringing my Z6 III with lenses covering 14-180 mm, but then I realized that this would be a ”friends trip” with a lot of time on small buses being guided to various sites in Iceland. And having a full-frame setup with all the lenses on a small bus didn’t seem to be a good idea. So once again I decided to bring the GR IIIx … but based on my experiences from last year’s UK trip, I decided to see if I could get GR III as well. I was lucky enough to be able to buy a GR IV, so this year I was going with two cameras … which would both fit in the jacket I was wearing. And since I wanted to do some processing while traveling, I also brought my iPad Mini.

And … once again, this was the right choice. The buses were small, I could barely get my legs into the seats, and we were going in and out all the time. So having a small sling bag with the cameras plus some spare batteries worked very well.

Once again there were images that I couldn’t take because I didn’t have a lens with the ”correct” length. However, during these guided trip we usually only stayed for 30–60 minutes at each place, so there would have been little time available to set up a camera, find the correct composition, etc.

So for these kinds of trips the GR cameras are an excellent choice in my opinion, and if I get to go on a similar trip in the future I will definitely use the GRs again. But, if I would go to a photo trip, I would absolutely bring my full-frame gear.

Here are a few photos from the UK and Iceland, I think they turned out great.

Here are two sketch photos for an idea I have, I'm not sure how I will set up this photo. See these two as test shots to see if my idea will work. I need to make a few more attempts this week.

I've also spent some lunches walking around work trying to find something but haven't managed to take a decent image.

On Saturday evening/night I spend a few hours walking around the city (explanation in Swedish), and when I arrived home after midnight this is how the sky looked like.

Yes, the sky was really this red.