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

Fotocult (IT)Italy

CineVerse Roma 2026: il mondo della produzione audiovisiva fa tappa a Cinecittà

October 10

Il 16 e 17 ottobre 2026, gli iconici Cinecittà Studios (Teatro 26, Via Tuscolana 1055, Roma) ospiteranno CineVerse , l’atteso evento interamente dedicato al mondo della cinematografia e alle…

Read at Fotocult (IT) ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

CineVerse Roma 2026: il mondo della produzione audiovisiva fa tappa a Cinecittà

More from Fotocult (IT) on Hot Shoe

ItalyUn RAW converter gratuito che ti insegna a post-produrre? Ecco Aftershoot Photon con AI Coach Fotocult (IT)

ItalyGli angoscianti capolavori di Gregory Crewdson Fotocult (IT)

ItalyI fotografi di tutto il mondo scelgono i loro preferiti: ecco i vincitori del TIPA Photographers’ Choice 2026 Fotocult (IT)

ItalyCompatto e luminoso: lo zoom Tamron 20-40mm F/2.8 Di III VXD arriva anche sulle mirrorless di Nikon Fotocult (IT)

ItalyMuse, sirene e strani angeli davanti all’obiettivo di Guido Harari Fotocult (IT)

ItalyAggiuntivi ottici per smartphone: una rivoluzione che abbiamo già bocciato oltre dieci anni fa? Fotocult (IT)