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

LatAm CinemaLatAm

MASS lleva a Buenos Aires y Montevideo películas de los festivales de Málaga y San Sebastián; Paulina García recibe el Premio Ciudad de Huelva

11.06

Buenos Aires y Montevideo acogerán la tercera edición de MASS, una muestra que reúne seis películas españolas que formaron parte de las últimas ediciones del Festival de Málaga y el Festival de San…

Exhibitions & books

Read at LatAm Cinema ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

MASS lleva a Buenos Aires y Montevideo películas de los festivales de Málaga y San Sebastián; Paulina García recibe el Premio Ciudad de Huelva

Related

SpainArranca la 23ª edición del Festival de Cine Europeo de Sevilla Audiovisual451

GermanyWorld Press Photo Contest 2027: Einreichungsstart am 1. Dezember Profifoto

SpainRemedios Malvárez, Ana Luísa Oliveira y Moisés Rodríguez, Jurado Oficial del Festival de Huelva Cine y Tele

CinemaBritish Society of Cinematographers announces 2026 BSC Short Film Competition winners British Cinematographer

Reviews2026 has been the weirdest year ever for camera releases. Here are the winners and losers so far… Amateur Photographer

CinemaGlasgow Film Festival reveals first titles for 2027 edition, new venue partner and international pitching opportunity British Cinematographer