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

LightPix CoGrip Is a $29.90 Thumb Grip That Keeps the Ricoh GR IV Hot Shoe Working, Flash Included

11.03

LightPix Labs has a new thumb grip called CoGrip, $29.90 on Amazon, for the Ricoh GR IV, GR III and GR IIIx and the Fujifilm X100VI, X-E5 and X-M5. Most thumb grips use up the hot shoe.

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LightPix CoGrip Is a $29.90 Thumb Grip That Keeps the Ricoh GR IV Hot Shoe Working, Flash Included

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Latest

LightPix CoGrip Is a $29.90 Thumb Grip That Keeps the Ricoh GR IV Hot Shoe Working, Flash Included

Related

ReviewsRicoh GR Space coming to New York this winter DPReview

RumoursFinally: six different Ricoh GR models are currently in stock in Canada (incl. the GR IV Anniversary Edition) Pentax Rumors

ReviewsCIPA August 2026: Compacts surge as full frame slumps Macfilos

FranceRicoh GR IV Monochrome : le firmware 1.10 ajoute un mode solarisation inspiré de l’argentique Photo Trend (FR)

Japanカメラ4機種向け無償ファームウエアを公開 「EOS R1」「EOS R5 Mark II」「EOS R50 V」「PowerShot V1」対応アップデート Canon Japan newsroom (camera & lens)

RumoursFInally: six different Ricoh GR camera models are currently in stock in the US Pentax Rumors

Japanカメラ4機種向け無償ファームウエアを公開「EOS R1」「EOS R5 Mark II」「EOS R50 V」「PowerShot V1」対応アップデート Canon Japan newsroom (camera & lens)