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

ProduLatAm

FIAP celebró la creatividad con alma en AWLATAM

11.05

Ciudad de México se convirtió en punto de encuentro para la creatividad iberoamericana durante la gala presencial de FIAP 2026, realizada en el IMAX del Papalote Museo del Niño en el marco de…

Read at Produ ↗

More from Produ on Hot Shoe

LatAmCaracol Televisión lanza ¿En qué lío me metí?, serie de la que destaca su esencia colombiana con una combinación de comedia, drama y suspenso Produ

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

FIAP celebró la creatividad con alma en AWLATAM

More from Produ on Hot Shoe

LatAmOcellus, Riedel y Sony disputan el galardón a Mejor Equipo de Tecnología Produ

LatAmCazéTV, TV Azteca, Oxobox y TVTel compiten por el galardón al Mejor Proyecto Tecnológico Produ

LatAmNSC TV reemplaza satélite por transporte IP de Appear y alista producción remota en Brasil Produ

LatAmCaracol Televisión lanza ¿En qué lío me metí?, serie de la que destaca su esencia colombiana con una combinación de comedia, drama y suspenso Produ

LatAmGrey Juice Lab lanza ventas internacionales del documental El Diego que nadie vio antes de su estreno en el Festival de Mar del Plata Produ

LatAmSebastián Jiménez y Flavio Morales de JK Media: “El vertical en español está creciendo muy rápido y queremos ser parte de esa industria” Produ