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

Cooke S4 FF/i Launches as Six Full-Frame T2.0 Primes, at Half the Weight of the S7/i

10.22

Cooke has announced the S4 FF/i, a full-frame version of its S4/i cine primes. Six lenses from 18mm to 100mm, all T2.0, all with an 87mm front, and between 1.45kg and 1.8kg each.

Mirrorless bodies Lenses BLOG

Read at Camera Decision ↗

Also covered by: RedShark News

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Cooke S4 FF/i Launches as Six Full-Frame T2.0 Primes, at Half the Weight of the S7/i

Related

CinemaCooke Optics announces S4 FF/i spherical prime lenses for full-frame production Cinematography World

CinemaCooke S4 FF/i Announced – Full-Frame T2.0 Primes, 385mm Average Close Focus, 87mm Front Diameter CineD

ReviewsLeica's luxury compact gets the Formula One treatment – the Q3 43 F1 Edition oozes racing class T3 cameras

CinemaCooke S4 FF/i: full-frame primes, specs and price RedShark News

ReviewsLeica’s F1 edition Q3 43 comes with carbon fiber, red accents and a race-inspired color mode DPReview

RumoursViltrox AF 35mm f/1.4 Pro full-frame lens coming soon Photo Rumors