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

Gold DerbyCinema

Best Animated Feature race: ‘Wildwood’ tops the odds as it seeks to top the box office

10.23

Laika's first stop-motion feature in seven years holds a narrow lead in Gold Derby's odds.

Read at Gold Derby ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Best Animated Feature race: ‘Wildwood’ tops the odds as it seeks to top the box office

More from Gold Derby on Hot Shoe

Cinema‘The Imaginary Invalid’: Bill Irwin’s Broadway revival receives a mixed diagnosis from critics Gold Derby

Cinema‘Yaga’: Carrie-Anne Moss talks playing the femme fatale, and falling for Hudson Williams’s double act Gold Derby

CinemaJoey Pollari says ‘AHS: 13’ fans will have a viral meltdown over the shocking Constance-Fiona twist: ‘Cue the GIFs, cue the memes’ Gold Derby

Cinema‘The Traitors: New Blood’ Episode 7 recap: Game-changing ‘new power’ is unleashed during dramatic Round Table Gold Derby

Cinema‘Hell’s Kitchen’ recap: Losing chef regrets not cussing out his teammate in ‘The Meat of the Matter’ Gold Derby

Cinema‘General Hospital’ vs. ‘Beyond the Gates’: The showdown that could rewrite Daytime Emmys history Gold Derby