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

Camera DecisionReviews

Camera Decision iPhone App Is Out and Free: Gear List, Packing Checklists, Photo Spots, Reminders and Shoot Planner

11.05

The Camera Decision app is on the App Store. It puts our photography tools on your iPhone, with a shoot planner, a gear list, packing checklists, saved photo spots, reminders, a light meter, an ND…

Smartphones BLOG

Read at Camera Decision ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Camera Decision iPhone App Is Out and Free: Gear List, Packing Checklists, Photo Spots, Reminders and Shoot Planner

Related

LatAmDisney realizó su Upfront ’27 en Argentina con novedades de ficción local e internacional, deportes y experiencias en vivo Produ

ReviewsMotorola's new flagship phone has a world-first action sensor – but can a phone camera really freeze motion? Digital Camera World

ReviewsI’ve never owned or used an iPhone – what am I missing? Amateur Photographer

TechWe checked out Chromagraph, Rian Johnson's viral iPhone camera app Smartphone photography (GSMArena)

ReviewsWhy do we want better smartphone cameras but worse dedicated cameras? Digital Camera World

TechRian Johnson explains why he had to build his own iPhone camera app The Verge Cameras