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

Audiovisual451Spain

Las mujeres JASP de la industria española (entrega 30)

11.04

Empezamos esta trigésima entrega de nuestras mujeres “Jóvenes Aunque Sobradamente Preparadas” (JASP) del audiovisual español con una ración de datos: el Observatorio Audiovisual Europeo, liderado por…

Read at Audiovisual451 ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Las mujeres JASP de la industria española (entrega 30)

More from Audiovisual451 on Hot Shoe

SpainLa TDT afronta la primera fase de su conversión a la Ultra Alta Definición (UHD) con cambios en la distribución de canales Audiovisual451

SpainEl Gobierno aprueba convocar las ayudas selectivas del ICAA para el año 2027, por un importe de 37 millones de euros Audiovisual451

SpainEl proyecto brasileño ‘Perto de Mim, Longe de Tudo’ gana el Premio CIIF Market 2026 Audiovisual451

SpainLaura Mañá rueda ‘La Reina’, una producción de Arcadia Motion Pictures, sobre la vida de la boxeadora Miriam Gutiérrez Audiovisual451

SpainFilmin estrenará ‘Blindspot Berlin’, nueva miniserie alemana de ficción basada en hechos reales Audiovisual451

SpainSerielizados bate récord de público con más de 18.000 asistentes en su 13ª edición Audiovisual451