The small bracket on top of every camera, from a phone rig to an ARRI.

The hot shoe is where the flash goes, and the microphone, and the monitor, and whatever the next decade bolts on. Every camera has one and nobody photographs it. This magazine is named after it because that is where the whole business meets: the body, the glass, the light, the sound, and the person holding it.

I shot news in Gothenburg for nine years and documentary for hire after that, then stopped taking assignments to write about the tools. Since 2021 I live in Tokyo, ten minutes from the used-camera shops of Shinjuku, which is not an accident: Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fujifilm, Panasonic, Ricoh and Sigma make almost everything worth pointing at a subject, and their own press writes about it first, in Japanese. So this magazine reads it there, and in German, French, Italian and Spanish, and in English from the reviewers who actually put a card in the slot — around eighty sources and thirty channels, counted and plotted so you can see what is moving.

Bodies and lenses, cinema cameras and drones, film and the darkroom, firmware and the software that finishes the picture, the rumours before the launch and the reviews after it, and the photographers and shows the rest of it is for. I test what I write about on a job before a word goes down. I shoot film on Sundays and do not think that makes me interesting.

A story here is a headline, a short excerpt, one picture and the link to whoever reported it. We never reprint the article, and the picture belongs to the photographer or the maker. A story written in Japanese appears in Japanese, as its author set it down; the link goes to the original.

— Mara Lindqvist, Tokyo

HISTORY · THE MOVIE CAMERA

Cinema cameras, 1888 to now

From a single-lens box in Leeds to a 65 mm digital sensor you can only rent: the machines that set how films look.

Hand-cranked film

1888

Le Prince camera

A single lens, paper film, Leeds.

1891

Kinetograph

Stop-and-go film movement, Edison's lab.

1895

Cinématographe

Camera, printer and projector in one.

Studio film

1912

Bell & Howell 2709

The first all-metal production camera.

1937

Arriflex 35

The first reflex 35 mm camera: the operator sees through the lens.

1972

Panaflex

Quiet enough for sound without a blimp, light enough to hold.

Moving camera

1970

IMAX

15/70 film running sideways for very large screens.

1971

Aaton

A French maker based in Grenoble.

1975

Steadicam

Garrett Brown's stabiliser separates the camera from the operator's steps.

Digital cinema

2007

RED One

A 4K digital cinema camera; shipped August 2007.

2010

ARRI Alexa

ARRI's move to digital; in film, TV and commercials.

2014

Alexa 65

6.5K on a 65 mm sensor, available by rental only.

One letter a week, starting soon.

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