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Hot Shoe

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· Trade shows and launch events, this week's stories from each corner of the industry, and what its press is covering.

On view

This week, from that corner the newest stories from the corner of the industry you picked

The wire their own posts, translated

How pictures get made in 2026 from the industry's own reports

Sources

Fetched every six hours, linked to the original

About

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

GUIDE · WHAT TO BUY

What to buy for what you want to make

Pick the goal first, then the budget. At every level the order of spending is the same: light and sound, then lenses, then the camera body.

SPEND 01

Light

Good light beats a better sensor. A window, a reflector, then one soft light.

SPEND 02

Sound

For video, a clean voice matters more than sharpness.

SPEND 03

Lenses

Glass outlives bodies; one fast prime changes more than an upgrade.

SPEND 04

Body

Buy the camera last, and second-hand is fine.

YOUR GOAL	START WITH WHAT YOU HAVE	STEP UP	WORKING PROFESSIONAL
A short film	A phone with a manual video app, a clip-on mic, one LED panel, a small tripod.	A camera that records log, a 35 mm and a 50 mm prime, a wireless mic kit, two lights.	A cinema body, a set of matched primes, follow focus, monitor, a lighting package and a sound recordist.
Weddings	Not a starting job: assist a working shooter first.	Two bodies with two card slots, a fast standard zoom, a fast prime, a flash, wireless mics.	Two or three matched bodies, a long zoom for the ceremony, gimbal, backup of everything.
Portraits	Any camera with a 50 mm lens and a window.	A short telephoto prime, one strobe or LED with a big softbox, a reflector.	Two or three heads, modifiers, a backdrop system and tethering.
Travel photography	A phone or a compact with a large sensor.	A light system body with a small standard zoom and a wide prime.	A weather-sealed body, two zooms covering wide to tele, a travel tripod.
YouTube	The phone you own, a clip-on mic, a window in front of you.	A mirrorless body with a flip screen, a wide prime, a key light.	Two cameras for two angles, a mic on a boom, three lights, a quiet room.