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Hot Shoe

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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

SchoolTrack 4 · Film

LESSON · THE DARKROOM

Developer, stop, fixer

How a black-and-white roll becomes negatives in a kitchen: three chemicals, one tank, about half an hour.

STEP 01

Developer

Turns the hidden image into a visible one: it reduces the silver halides that saw light into black metallic silver.

ALKALINE · TIMED TO THE MINUTE

STEP 02

Stop bath

An acid bath, usually about 2% acetic acid, that cancels the alkaline developer and halts development at once.

WEAK ACID · 30–60 S

STEP 03

Fixer

Removes the silver halides that never saw light, so the film stops reacting and can face daylight.

THIOSULFATE · THEN WASH

Step by step

BLACK-AND-WHITE · MOST CHARTS ARE TIMED AT 20 °C

01In the darkLoad the film onto the reel inside a changing bag or a dark room, then close the tank. From here the lights can be on.
02DeveloperPour in at the chart's temperature, start the timer, invert the tank gently at set intervals.
03StopPour out the developer, pour in the stop bath, agitate for under a minute.
04FixerPour in the fixer and agitate for the time on its bottle. Fixer can be reused.
05WashRun water through the tank until the fixer is gone, then a drop of wetting agent.
06DryHang the strip in a dust-free room with a clip at the bottom. Cut and sleeve when dry.

WHAT YOU NEED

The home kit

Tank and reels

Changing bag

Thermometer

Measuring jugs

Timer

Drying clips

Work with gloves and air, keep the chemicals out of the kitchen cups, and follow the safety sheet and times printed on your developer and fixer.