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

Insta360 X5 Firmware 1.13.21 Adds AI Director, and It Edits Your Clips While the Camera Charges

September 23

The Insta360 X5 got a firmware update on September 16 that does something unusual. Version 1.13.21 adds AI Director: while the X5 is switched off and charging, it goes through your footage, picks the…

Drones & action Firmware & software AI in imaging BLOG

Read at Camera Decision ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

Insta360 X5 Firmware 1.13.21 Adds AI Director, and It Edits Your Clips While the Camera Charges

Related

ReviewsInsta360 Luna Ultra Firmware 1.1.12 Adds 15x Zoom, Stage Mode and a $49.99 Telephoto Lens Camera Decision

CinemaInsta360 Luna Ultra Gets a Major Boost With 15x Zoom, 4K Vertical Video, and New Stage Mode No Film School

CinemaInsta360 Luna Ultra Firmware Update Released – 15x Zoom, Concert Stage Mode, 4K Vertical Video and a 450mm Telephoto Lens CineD

CinemaInsta360 Luna Ultra: Ultra Telephoto Lens, Stage Mode, new firmware RedShark News

DronesFrameTap just got better, and DJI Pocket 4P owners will notice DroneDJ

DronesNestGen 2026: How Shell, LA Metro, and others are scaling drone AI DroneDJ