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

Directors NotesCinema

From “Back Alley Head Job” to SXSW Award-Winner: Lee Lawson on the Evolution of ‘Man Eating Pussy’

10.22

Winner of the Midnight Short Special Jury Award at SXSW and recently screened as part of the BFI London Film Festival , Lee Lawson’s unforgettable short film Man Eating Pussy has made quite an…

Exhibitions & books

Read at Directors Notes ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

From “Back Alley Head Job” to SXSW Award-Winner: Lee Lawson on the Evolution of ‘Man Eating Pussy’

Related

Cinema10 Exciting Shorts to Keep an Eye on from the 70th BFI London Film Festival Directors Notes

CinemaFrom Cosmic Head Explosions to Awkward Third Wheels: 11 Short Films to Discover at Encounters Film Festival 2026 Directors Notes

India42 Award-Winning Photos From Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition Reveal a Hidden Universe 121clicks

VFXLondon’s Design Museum hosts behind the scenes exhibit on Laika’s Wildwood Animated Views

IndiaTiny Worlds, Big Wonders: 33 Award-Winning Water Drop Macro Photos 121clicks

CultureExhibition: Tarrafal by João Pina GOST Books