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

Cinema ExpressIndia

Juno Temple, James McAvoy to star in Almost You

10.26

Actors Juno Temple ( Ted Lasso ), James McAvoy ( The Last King of Scotland , X-Men film series), and Joey King ( We Were the Lucky Ones ) will be starring in the upcoming sci-fi comedy film Almost…

News

Read at Cinema Express ↗

Also covered by: The Playlist

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Juno Temple, James McAvoy to star in Almost You

More from Cinema Express on Hot Shoe

IndiaSubhas Chandra Bose's grandnephew on teaser for Prabhas' Fauzi: 'Mixing fiction with history is a crime' Cinema Express

IndiaVetri Maaran addresses lip sync issues in his films: 'I ask my team if they want sync or story' Cinema Express

IndiaSaif Ali Khan-Vidya Balan's next titled Long Years Ago; French actor Melanie Laurent joins cast Cinema Express

IndiaKriti Sanon teases an ‘unexpected reunion’ with Bhediya team Varun Dhawan and Amar Kaushik in new social media post Cinema Express

IndiaShilpa Rao’s husband reacts to her performance being cut short: ‘Watching my wife being treated with such disrespect…’ Cinema Express

IndiaSangeeth Prathap-Sharaf U Dheen's It’s A Medical Miracle clocks over 15 million minutes of watch time on ManoramaMAX Cinema Express