Skip to content

Hot Shoe

Latest

On the calendar

· 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

Boulevard du Temple, Louis Daguerre, 1838: a Paris boulevard seen from above, empty but for two small figures at a corner

Masters1820s–1840s

Boulevard du Temple

Louis Daguerre, 1838. A Paris street seen from the window of his studio, and widely held to be the first photograph with a person in it.

Open the Commons record

PHOTOGRAPHER: Louis Daguerre · 18 November 1787 – 10 July 1851
DATE AND PLACE: 8 am, between 24 April and 4 May 1838 (possibly 1837) · Paris
PROCESS: Daguerreotype, a plate about 13 × 16 cm
EXPOSURE: Four to five minutes
THE PLATE: Damaged further by a failed restoration after 1970; copies today come from Beaumont Newhall's reproductions
RIGHTS: Public domain · record on Wikimedia Commons

Read the frame

01

An empty street

The boulevard was busy, but the plate needed minutes of light, so people and horses moved on before they could register.

02

Bottom left

Two figures stayed still long enough: a man having his boots polished and the bootblack. Some think the second is a water pump.

03

Reversed

Like all of Daguerre's plates, the scene is a mirror image: left and right are swapped.

NEXT IN THE LIBRARY

Keep reading the masters

View from the Window at Le Gras, Nicéphore Niépce, 1827

NICÉPHORE NIÉPCE · 1827

View from the Window at Le Gras

Migrant Mother, Dorothea Lange, 1936

DOROTHEA LANGE · 1936

Migrant Mother

Facts from Wikipedia, 'Boulevard du Temple (photograph)' and 'Louis Daguerre', and the file's record on Wikimedia Commons, read 2026.10.16.