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

CinemaníaSpain

'Dune 3' lanza su tráiler definitivo tras superar la preventa de entradas de 'La Odisea'

10.27

Este 2026 concluirá con un duelo de grandes blockbusters . Un duelo que se ha comparado con el Barbenheimer; sin mucho sentido, pues el público objetivo parece ser similar de cara a ambos…

Cinemanía - Noticias

Read at Cinemanía ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

'Dune 3' lanza su tráiler definitivo tras superar la preventa de entradas de 'La Odisea'

More from Cinemanía on Hot Shoe

SpainLa serie de 'Harry Potter' encuentra a James y Lily Potter: así serán los padres del joven mago en la nueva adaptación Cinemanía

Spain'Animal', la serie sensación de Luis Zahera en Netflix, ya tiene fecha de estreno para la temporada 2 Cinemanía

Spain'ACOTAR 6' ya está aquí: qué pasa con la adaptación la saga de fantasía de Sarah J. Maas que obsesiona a las mejores actrices Cinemanía

SpainHe visto 5 minutos de 'Licántropo' y ya puedo decir que es una de las mejores películas de Robert Eggers ('Nosferatu') Cinemanía

Spain'Cameron Winter at Carnegie Hall': Paul Thomas Anderson desmiente al algoritmo a base de austeridad Cinemanía

SpainMuere Susan Saint James, actriz de 'Kate y Allie' y 'McMillan y esposa' y ganadora del premio Emmy Cinemanía