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

Laowa Aksen 45mm f/2.8 1-5x and 17.5mm f/1.7 5-10x Cost $749 Each, and Only Two Lenses We List Go Past 2x

October 12

Laowa's two Aksen lenses take you from life size all the way to 10x, and they cost $749 each for the photo versions.

Lenses BLOG

Read at Camera Decision ↗

ReviewsBH Deal Zone October 11: Megadap ETZ21 Pro+ Puts Sony E Lenses on Nikon Z for $199 Camera Decision

ReviewsNikon vs Viltrox vs Panasonic 26mm Pancakes: the Viltrox Costs $247 Less Than the Nikon on Z Mount Camera Decision

ReviewsNikkor Z 120-300mm f/2.8 Ships This Month and May Cost More Than Nikon's 400mm f/2.8 Camera Decision

ReviewsLight Lens Lab 50mm f/2 APO Is Due in 2027, and the Leica Version of That Lens Costs $9,270 Camera Decision

ReviewsCanon Stops Repairing Five EF Lenses From the End of October, and Only Three Have an RF Replacement Camera Decision

ReviewsThypoch AF 23mm f/1.4 Sculptor Unveiled in Paris: Its First Autofocus Prime, and the Eighth AF 23mm at f/1.4 or Brighter on Fujifilm X Camera Decision

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest