Casual Photophile

6 stories

Casual PhotophileFilmLemons and Lemonade – a Review of the Pentax PC35AF James reviews the Pentax PC35AF, a compact film camera from 1982 that's often more trouble than it's worth.

January 31

Casual PhotophileFilmMy Ultimate Adventure Camera: Leica SL2-S Long Term Review Jonathan shares long term thoughts on his "ultimate adventure camera," the Leica SL2-S.

January 20

Casual PhotophileFilmNikon Nikkor Z 28mm F/2.8 Lens Review James reviews an ultimate value performer in the Nikon Nikkor Z 28mm f/2.8 for Z Mount Nikon cameras.

January 13

Casual PhotophileFilmDepth of Field in Photography: The Art of the Unsharp Image In Part One of a two-part examination of Depth of Field, Sroyon explores the artistic reasons someone might choose deep or shallow DoF.

January 6

Casual PhotophileFilmI Love My Terrible Sony Mavica Floppy Disk Camera from 1999 James shoots the Sony Mavica floppy disk camera from 1999, and it's terrible.

December 30, 2025

Casual PhotophileFilmFuji GA645Zi Professional Review: Releasing Control Jeb shoots some Kodak Portra through the Fuji GA645Zi, an unusual medium format with a point-and-shoot sensibility.

August 25, 2025

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