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

TV TechnologyVideo

Blackmagic Brings Mexican Film ‘Aquí Hay Dragones’ to Life

October 5

MEXICO CITY —As a post producer at Caffeine , a global creative postproduction studio with a presence in Mexico City, Los Angeles and New York, my team and I work on projects for some of the world’s…

Cinema cameras

Read at TV Technology ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

Blackmagic Brings Mexican Film ‘Aquí Hay Dragones’ to Life

Related

CinemaUK Music Video Awards 2026 nominations announced – including for excellence in cinematography British Cinematographer

CinemaMetamorphosis EXOCAGE: A Modular, 3D-Printed Cage System for Sony FX3/FX30 and Panasonic Lumix S5II/S1II Newsshooter

CinemaARRI and HONOR bring “professional cinematic imaging” to co-branded HONOR Magic9 Pro Max British Cinematographer

ReviewsLucky C400 35mm film review: I might have just found my new favourite color film for shooting the city Amateur Photographer

JapanBlackmagic Design導入事例：ファンタジーシリーズ「The Exorcism of Nixie」の場合 PRONEWS

CinemaBlackmagic Cloud Store 2.1.1 Newsshooter