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

DPReviewReviews

Laowa says its new 24mm F2 is the fastest tilt-shift lens yet

11.05

The $1249 lens offers up to ±10° of tilt and ±12mm of shift, with versions for several full-frame mirrorless systems as well as Fujifilm GFX and Hasselblad X.

Mirrorless bodies Lenses Medium format

Read at DPReview ↗

Also covered by: L-Rumors, Newsshooter, Fstoppers, Digital Camera World, PetaPixel

ReviewsLaowa 24mm f/2 Zero-D Tilt-Shift review: tilt, shift and full axis rotation for many and varied mirrorless cameras, and with no noticeable distortion Digital Camera World

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Laowa says its new 24mm F2 is the fastest tilt-shift lens yet

Related

ReviewsThe Laowa 24mm f/2 Zero-D Tilt-Shift Is the Fastest Tilt-Shift Lens Ever PetaPixel

RumoursTamron Eyes Medium Format: New Patent Details Three Fast Primes With GFX Sensor Coverage Fuji Addict

RumoursTamron Patents Three New Medium Format Lenses Fuji Rumors

ReviewsLaowa 24mm f/2 Zero-D Tilt-Shift review: tilt, shift and full axis rotation for many and varied mirrorless cameras, and with no noticeable distortion Digital Camera World

ReviewsTamron Patents Three Medium Format Primes, a 60mm f/1.8, 75mm f/1.9 and 130mm f/2.6 Camera Decision

ReviewsViltrox Air 40mm Review: Leica Q3 43 field of view on a budget Macfilos