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

Track 1 · Exposure5 min read

LESSON 02

Shutter speed

How long the sensor looks at the scene. It decides whether motion freezes or flows.

THE SAME RUNNER AT FIVE SPEEDS

1/4000 s
1/1000 s
1/250 s
1/60 s
1/15 s

← FREEZES MOTION · LESS LIGHTMORE LIGHT · MORE BLUR →

What the number means

The shutter speed is the time the shutter stays open, in seconds. 1/1000 is a thousandth of a second; at 1/15 the shutter stays open about sixty-seven times longer and lets in that much more light.

Light

Each step that doubles the time doubles the light: 1/500 to 1/250 is one stop brighter. To keep the same exposure, close the aperture one stop or halve the ISO.

Motion

A fast shutter freezes a runner, a splash or a bird. A slow one turns water to silk and people into streaks. Hold the camera still, or put it on a tripod, below about one over the focal length.

Try it today

01Set S or Tv, shutter priority.
02Find moving water or traffic.
03Shoot at 1/1000 s.
04Shoot again at 1/15 s, braced on a wall.
05Compare the motion in the two frames.

Aperture

ISO

One letter a week, starting soon.

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