Skip to content

Hot Shoe

Down the Road (Jim Grey)

25 stories

Down the Road (Jim Grey)CinemaTwenty years ago… …I visited Vandalia, Illinois, for the first time and saw the Madonna of the Trail that was there. This is one of twelve identical monuments placed along the National Old Trails Road coast to coast…

Down the Road (Jim Grey)CinemaWhy I remain the author when AI helps me write Suppose I’m working on an article for this site and I have a conversation about it with a friend. I tell him what I’m thinking, and he offers an observation I hadn’t considered.

Down the Road (Jim Grey)CinemaTen years ago… …I was on my way to Nashville here in Indiana and decided to find the Bean Blossom Covered Bridge on the way. That’s the car I drove then, through the bridge’s portals.

Down the Road (Jim Grey)CinemaOld cars parked: October 2026 I got around in October, traveling around Indiana and even to central Florida. I feature a car here when it is/could be more than 20 model years old and I found it parked on the street or in a lot .

Down the Road (Jim Grey)CinemaFive years ago… I was in the office at work. This was the view from the nearest window to my desk in downtown Indianapolis.

Down the Road (Jim Grey)CinemaRecommended reading Still muddling through feeling ill. The worst was over by last weekend but I have a lingering cough, drip, and fatigue. I haven’t been ill like this since before the pandemic.

Down the Road (Jim Grey)CinemaA weekend in The Villages Margaret and I spent a long weekend in The Villages in central Florida in October. Margaret’s sister and her husband retired there and invited us.

Down the Road (Jim Grey)CinemaOne month in I’ve been at the new, full-time, in-office job for a month now. Most of my career I’ve worked in small, young companies — founded no more than ten years or so ago, with anywhere from a couple dozen…

Down the Road (Jim Grey)Cinemasingle frame: Gas station cookies Gas station cookies Kodak Brownie Twin-20 Kodak T-Max 100 Bellini Ecofilm 1+1 2026 I bought this circa-1960 camera for 620 film on eBay earlier this year, on impulse. A proper review is forthcoming.

Down the Road (Jim Grey)CinemaMt. Moriah Primitive Baptist Church You’ll find it on County Road 350 W near Stilesville, in Hendricks County, Indiana — this old church, built in 1867.

Down the Road (Jim Grey)Cinema40mm f/2 Zuiko Auto-S The 40mm f/2 Zuiko Auto-S is one of my top favorite manual-focus SLR lenses. I’m hardly a lens expert but I am a decades-long hobbyist who’s experienced a lot of gear.

Down the Road (Jim Grey)CinemaRecommended reading Forgive the short list this week; I’ve been sick and it’s taken up a lot of my energy. ▷ Here’s Mike Eckman with a review of one of the stranger cameras you’re going to come across.

Down the Road (Jim Grey)CinemaSame scene, two cameras I made both of these images within seconds of each other on a 2015 trip along the National Road in eastern Indiana.

Down the Road (Jim Grey)CinemaRock shows Who have you seen in concert? This is the sixth update of my concert list since I first shared it in 2008. This helps me remember who I’ve seen.

Down the Road (Jim Grey)Cinemasingle frame: Broad Ripple Brewpub Broad Ripple Brewpub Olympus OM-2n, 40mm f/2 Zuiko Auto-S Kodak T-Max 400 Bellini Ecofilm 1+1 2026 Here it is, the first brewpub in Indianapolis.

Down the Road (Jim Grey)CinemaGood blogkeeping: Shutting down my companion Facebook page You may or may not know that there’s a companion Facebook page for this site. You can see it here . But do it soon, because in the coming days I’m shutting it down.

Down the Road (Jim Grey)CinemaPhotos of old cars from the Olympus XA I finished my roll of Fujicolor 200 in the Olympus XA at the Zionsville car show in September. I want to kick this off with this Brazilian Chevrolet C-10 truck.

Down the Road (Jim Grey)CinemaGiving my Olympus XA some exercise I always have a good time using my Olympus XA, but this time I wasn’t fully happy with the scans I got back from my lab. The colors all looked subdued, and contrast was low.

Down the Road (Jim Grey)CinemaRecommended reading Best of the blogs ▷ brandib laments the loss of easily obtained (i.e., at the local department store) good quality professional clothing. Read When Did We Agree To Settle For Less?

Down the Road (Jim Grey)CinemaThe abandoned US 40 between Casey and Greenup, Illinois In Illinois, the National Road appears to be one of the earliest roads to be improved at the dawn of the automobile era. I’ve found pavement on this road dating to the 1910s , for example.

Down the Road (Jim Grey)CinemaWhere cars no longer go First published 6 October 2008. We all have our hobbies. Some people follow pro football, some run, some make lovely quilts, some fish, some solve the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle.

Down the Road (Jim Grey)Cinemasingle frame: Airbnb coffee Airbnb coffee Nikon Df, 28-200 f/3.5-5.6G AF Nikkor 2026 I made this shot at dark thirty the morning I gave up sleeping in my Airbnb in Vandalia, Illinois.

Down the Road (Jim Grey)CinemaThe case of the scratched negatives My 35mm negatives were scanning with horizontal scratches across most frames. It was a time-consuming pain in the ass to remove those scratches in post — and sometimes, it was impossible.

Down the Road (Jim Grey)CinemaGiving my Olympus OM-2n some exercise I got out my Olympus OM-2n just after Labor Day because it’s so great to shoot. I have a terrific, almost-pancake 40mm f/2 Zuiko Auto-S lens for it, so I mounted it.

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