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

← Hot Shoe Archive

StudentFilmmakers MagazineVideo

AItoNFT Founding Creator Challenge: open call for artists and digital creators

10.31

Calling artists, musicians, video creators, game developers and community builders. Bring your work or project to AItoNFT and become a […] Source

Read at StudentFilmmakers Magazine ↗

More from StudentFilmmakers Magazine on Hot Shoe

VideoQuickLink StudioEdge Simplifies Remote Interviews and Elevates Live Storytelling for Finland’s Leading Commercial Broadcaster, MTV Oy StudentFilmmakers Magazine

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

AItoNFT Founding Creator Challenge: open call for artists and digital creators

More from StudentFilmmakers Magazine on Hot Shoe

VideoQuickLink StudioEdge Simplifies Remote Interviews and Elevates Live Storytelling for Finland’s Leading Commercial Broadcaster, MTV Oy StudentFilmmakers Magazine

VideoLive Webinars: Horror Storyboarding and Directing AI StudentFilmmakers Magazine

VideoCarole Dorothy Joyce Grant for Student Filmmakers – Open for Submissions StudentFilmmakers Magazine

VideoEver Feel Like You’re On A Movie Set In NYC? StudentFilmmakers Magazine

VideoShooting my first television drama series by UK-based cinematographer Mari Yamamura StudentFilmmakers Magazine

VideoShooting in a Real Location? Why Every Location Asks for a COI (and How to Get One) StudentFilmmakers Magazine