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

Audiovisual451Spain

El director de fotografía Néstor Almendros protagoniza el nuevo documental original de Movistar Plus

10.26

Ya se rueda ‘Néstor’, película documental sobre la vida y el legado de Néstor Almendros, uno de los directores de fotografía más influyentes de la historia del cine y el primer español en ganar el…

Read at Audiovisual451 ↗

More from Audiovisual451 on Hot Shoe

SpainDiego Betancor debuta en la producción cinematográfica con ‘Una familia’, un proyecto de seis años que apostó por el rodaje en 16 mm pese a las limitaciones presupuestarias Audiovisual451

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

El director de fotografía Néstor Almendros protagoniza el nuevo documental original de Movistar Plus

More from Audiovisual451 on Hot Shoe

SpainAbierta la convocatoria [IMPULSO] para proyectos y productoras madrileñas en Ventana Sur 2026 Audiovisual451

SpainEl CDPAI presenta sus nuevos proyectos iberoamericanos ante la industria audiovisual Audiovisual451

SpainUn rodaje, múltiples empresas: todo estaba previsto, salvo que coincidieran Audiovisual451

Spain‘Superra’ – estreno 29 de octubre en Primeran Audiovisual451

Spain‘Matar a un oso’ y ‘Etty’, mejores series de la decimotercera edición de Serielizados Audiovisual451

SpainDiego Betancor debuta en la producción cinematográfica con ‘Una familia’, un proyecto de seis años que apostó por el rodaje en 16 mm pese a las limitaciones presupuestarias Audiovisual451