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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

SchoolTrack 2 · Light

LESSON · LIGHT

Light for photo, light for video

A photograph needs light for a thousandth of a second; a video needs it for every frame. That one difference decides which lights each one uses.

Photo: flash

A short, very bright burst freezes motion.
Speedlights on the camera or on stands; studio strobes for more power.
A modelling lamp shows roughly where the light will fall.
You see the result only after the shot, on the screen.
Batteries last for hundreds of flashes.

Video: continuous

The light is on the whole time: what you see is what you record.
LED panels and point sources, Fresnels, HMIs, tubes.
It must not flicker at the camera's frame rate and shutter.
Colour quality matters: cheap LEDs can turn skin green or magenta.
Power and heat set how long you can shoot.

THREE-POINT LIGHTING · FROM ABOVE

Key

The main light, to one side of the camera. It shapes the face.

Fill

Softer, on the other side, to open the shadows the key leaves.

Back

Behind the subject, to draw a rim of light and lift them off the background.

One-light portrait

A strobe or LED in a big softbox at 45 degrees, a reflector opposite.

Interview

A soft key, a dim fill, a small back light; the window as a practical.

Product

Two softboxes either side, a white sweep, a flag to stop flare.

Night street

No kit at all: shop windows and street lamps, a fast lens, high ISO.