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

The Horse in Motion, Eadweard Muybridge, 1878: twelve frames of the mare Sallie Gardner running, in three rows

Masters1870s–1900s

The Horse in Motion

Eadweard Muybridge, 1878. A row of cameras caught a running horse in a dozen frames, to settle how its legs really move.

Open the Commons record

PHOTOGRAPHER: Eadweard Muybridge · 9 April 1830 – 8 May 1904
DATE AND PLACE: 19 June 1878 · the Palo Alto track, California
THE HORSE: Sallie Gardner, a mare owned by Leland Stanford, who paid for the work
THE CARDS: Cabinet cards, 22 × 14 cm, registered for copyright on 15 July 1878
COPY SHOWN: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
RIGHTS: Public domain · record on Wikimedia Commons

Read the frame

01

Read it like a page

Twelve frames in three rows, left to right, top to bottom. Each camera fired in turn as the horse passed it.

02

All four off

In some frames no hoof touches the ground, and the legs are gathered under the body, not stretched out as painters drew them.

03

The backdrop

A white wall with ruled lines stands behind the track, so the horse's position can be measured from frame to frame.

NEXT IN THE LIBRARY

Keep reading the masters

Boulevard du Temple, Louis Daguerre, 1838

LOUIS DAGUERRE · 1838

Boulevard du Temple

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

NICÉPHORE NIÉPCE · 1827

View from the Window at Le Gras

Facts from Wikipedia, 'The Horse in Motion' and 'Eadweard Muybridge', and the file's record on Wikimedia Commons, read 2026.10.16.