Skip to content

Hot Shoe

Fstoppers

25 stories

FstoppersReviewsWhy Kodak Film Sensitivity Depended on Cows and Mustard The working dose Samuel Sheppard wrote into his patent was 2 to 3 grains of thiosinamine per 100 pounds of dry gelatin, which works out to roughly three or four parts per million.

FstoppersReviewsWandrd’s Magnetic Camera Straps Are Here and the New Features Just Click Almost every camera strap on the market from a couple dozen brands right now makes use of links that make it a lot easier to connect the camera to the straps.

FstoppersReviewsHow Using a Team Approach to Camera Purchases Can Be More Effective Than One Size Fits All Finding the perfect camera that will fit every job is the dream. But sometimes, it’s more effective to build a team than rely on the power of one. [

FstoppersReviewsWe Review the MacBook Pro With PROLED XDR Display and M5 Max: The Screen Changes Everything The MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display is the first Mac laptop with a tandem OLED panel, and after two days with the 16-inch M5 Max I keep coming back to the same thought: Apple did not just bolt a…

FstoppersReviewsWhy the Best Forest Photos of the Day Were Steps From the Truck You drive out to a waterfall the day after a downpour, expecting a torrent, and find the creek almost dry.

FstoppersReviews3 Reasons To Use A Tilt Shift Lens Featuring The Laowa 24mm f/2 Zero-D Tilt-Shift Today I’m going to examine the benefits of using a tilt-shift lens with the help of the brand-new Laowa 24mm f/2 Zero-D Tilt-Shift. First, an admission. I’m not an architectural photographer.

FstoppersReviewsWhy Nikon's Z 120-300mm f/2.8 TC Is Like Carrying 4 Fast Primes in One Nikon's Z 120-300mm f/2.8 TC VR S is up for preorder at $13,996, and for that money, you get a constant f/2.8 zoom with a 1.4x teleconverter built into the barrel.

FstoppersReviewsThe Budget SG-image AF 55mm f/1.8 Is Sharp Corner to Corner by f/2.8 A standard prime is often the second lens people buy, and on Nikon Z, the inexpensive autofocus options have long trailed what Sony E shooters can pick from.

FstoppersReviews3 Ways to Select Anything in Photoshop, From the Lasso Tool to AI Almost every Photoshop edit beyond a global adjustment starts with telling the software which pixels to touch.

FstoppersReviewsKodachrome Ended in Parsons, Kansas: Dwayne's Photo Ran the Last Roll on January 18, 2011 In the last week of December 2010, a railroad worker named Jim DeNike drove from Arkansas to Parsons, Kansas, and loaded a dozen boxes holding nearly 50,000 slides into an old maroon Pontiac.

FstoppersReviewsThe Feature Nikon Never Shipped Every camera owner has their own list of things they wish their camera could do—features that seem easily achievable with a simple software update.

FstoppersReviewsWhy a Sub-$100 Godox Is the Most Versatile Flash in a Wedding Photographer's Bag Rangefinders like Leica's M bodies and compacts like Fujifilm's X100 line have pulled a lot of people back toward on-camera flash, and finding a speedlight that fits those small bodies without…

FstoppersReviewsWhat 30,000 Free Doritos Commercials Can Teach You About Spec Work Doritos once got more than 30,000 Super Bowl commercials made by fans, and most of the people who made them got nothing.

FstoppersReviewsLumix vs. TTArtisan vs. Viltrox: Why the Priciest 40mm Isn't the Clear Winner Panasonic, TTArtisan, and Viltrox all make a compact 40mm autofocus prime for full frame L-mount cameras, and one of them costs noticeably more than the other two.

FstoppersReviewsHigh-Speed Sync vs. Global Shutter for Flash Portraits in Bright Sun Shoot a flash portrait at f/1.2 in midday sun and you run into a wall fast: most cameras stop syncing with a flash somewhere around 1/160 to 1/250 s, and anything faster leaves dark bands across the…

FstoppersReviewsThe Preacher Who Patented Flexible Film in 1898 and Died Before Kodak Paid $5 Million for It Hannibal Goodwin's application for a photographic pellicle reached the Patent Office on May 2, 1887, and stayed there for eleven years and four months while a succession of five examiners rejected…

FstoppersReviewsYou Don’t Need a Macro Lens for Mushroom Photography. There, I Said It. There is a tendency in photography to believe that if we want to photograph a particular subject, we need to buy the equipment designed specifically for it. Want to photograph wildlife?

FstoppersReviewsWhy One Superzoom Might Be All You Need on a Long Hike The OM System M.Zuiko Digital ED 12-100mm f/4 IS PRO covers the same range as a 24-200mm zoom on full frame, so it raises an obvious question if you hike long distances with a camera: can one lens…

FstoppersReviewsWhy a Rained-Out Race Is Worth Photographing on Film A storm that cancels an event usually sends everyone home, camera included. On a long trip, the days that fall apart often produce the frames you end up keeping, and with film you won't know which…

FstoppersReviewsWhy the Panasonic Lumix S1RII Is a Great Buy for Everything but Sports The Panasonic Lumix S1RII pairs a 44-megapixel full frame sensor with 8K video for about $3,300, and that sensor isn't stacked, so it reads out slowly.

FstoppersReviewsWhy It's OK to Come Home From a Landscape Shoot Empty-Handed Watch enough landscape videos and you start to believe the professionals walk out at golden hour and come home with a portfolio image every time.

FstoppersReviewsCritique the Community: Unique Edit Welcome to the November installment of the Critique the Community! This month's critique theme is going to be " Unique Edit ," and we want to see your best photographs that were brought to life with…

FstoppersReviewsIn 2013, Researchers Pulled Recognizable Faces of Bystanders Out of the Eye Reflections in a Portrait An anonymous peer reviewer worked through a manuscript, looked at one of its figures, and recognized one of the authors. The face was a reflection in another person's eye.

FstoppersReviewsThe Luminar Fall Update Has Some Powerful New Tools Luminar has released a solid fall update with some new features and some enhancements. The update is free to current owners and can, of course, be purchased by photographers who are interested.

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