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

Fujifilm GFX100 II, GFX100S II and GFX100RF Get Bug Fix Firmware on the Same Day, and Fujifilm Lists No Details

11.04

Fujifilm released firmware for three GFX bodies on November 4: GFX100 II version 2.51, GFX100S II version 1.22 and GFX100RF version 1.14.

Mirrorless bodies Medium format Firmware & software BLOG

Read at Camera Decision ↗

Also covered by: Fujifilm Japan news

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Fujifilm GFX100 II, GFX100S II and GFX100RF Get Bug Fix Firmware on the Same Day, and Fujifilm Lists No Details

Related

RumoursFujifilm GFX100II, GFX100SII and GFX100RF Firmware Updates Released Fuji Addict

RumoursFirmware Updates for Fujifilm GFX100II, GFX100SII and GFX100RF Fragment Edition Fuji Rumors

RumoursTamron Patents Three New Medium Format Lenses Fuji Rumors

SoftwareUpdate: Pomfort Silverstack XT v9.4 – New Camera Formats Toolfarm

RumoursSony’s $80,000 RIALTO 65 Makes the $16,500 FUJIFILM GFX ETERNA 55 Look Like the Bargain of the Decade Fuji Addict

RumoursThis GRLife app is an unofficial, browser-based tool designed to create Ricoh GR custom firmware Pentax Rumors