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

British CinematographerCinema

James Oldham / Into the Betaverse

11.03

BUILDING A NEW UNIVERSE James Oldham explains how a “beautifully bespoke and cost-effective” virtual production pipeline helped to shape the look of TIFF-winning short film Into the Betaverse.

Read at British Cinematographer ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

James Oldham / Into the Betaverse

More from British Cinematographer on Hot Shoe

CinemaLuca Guadagnino’s Artificial to open 34th edition of ToruńCAMERIMAGE British Cinematographer

CinemaOla Shoyinka / Every Time I See a Yellow Car British Cinematographer

CinemaVERSA Studios continues its partnership with Leeds International Film Festival for its 40th anniversary British Cinematographer

CinemaBild Studios appoints David Elliott as senior producer to “expand MARS Volume’s flexible LED volume solutions” British Cinematographer

CinemaHow Astera and gaffer Ryan Webb lit Dexter: Resurrection S1 British Cinematographer

CinemaGoldcrest Post welcomes senior colourist Jodie Davidson British Cinematographer