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

Jaume Banacolocha de Diagonal: “La industria vive un momento de coproducción por obligación económica”

10.29

La industria de la ficción audiovisual atraviesa una fase de ajuste estructural marcada por la contención presupuestaria, la convergencia entre las cadenas de televisión abierta y las plataformas de…

Read at Produ ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Jaume Banacolocha de Diagonal: “La industria vive un momento de coproducción por obligación económica”

More from Produ on Hot Shoe

LatAmMIP Cancun anuncia panel sobre marcas y entretenimiento con Publicis, Nestlé y Heineken Produ

LatAmIngresos totales de TelevisaUnivision crecieron 9% en el tercer trimestre 2026 hasta alcanzar US$1.400 millones Produ

LatAmIsmael Cala sobre Isabel Bucaram: “Me enseñó el valor de las conexiones” Produ

LatAmFOX Entertainment Studios y Endemol Shine North America llevarán Fear Factor al formato vertical para la plataforma My Drama Produ

LatAmIsabel Bucaram: “El networking es crear puentes para que las personas crezcan unas gracias a otras” Produ

LatAmGonzalo Gamio de Sony PSLA: “Con Ocellus resolvemos el cuello de botella del tracking en producción virtual y transmisiones en vivo” Produ