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

Producción AudiovisualSpain

MERCI 2026 reivindica la importancia de la distribución independiente

11.01

El encuentro, celebrado en el marco de la 71ª Semana Internacional de Cine de Valladolid (Seminci), reunió durante tres jornadas a distribuidores independientes, exhibidores, responsables de…

Read at Producción Audiovisual ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

MERCI 2026 reivindica la importancia de la distribución independiente

More from Producción Audiovisual on Hot Shoe

SpainEl cine de autor internacional se impone en la 71ª Seminci, que supera los 100.000 espectadores Producción Audiovisual

Spain¿Quién sostiene realmente la taquilla española? Radiografía de un público en transformación Producción Audiovisual

SpainEstos son todos los cortometrajes que optan a ganar un Premio Goya en 2027 Producción Audiovisual

SpainMadrid celebra el Día Mundial de la Animación con grandes referentes nacionales e internacionales del sector Producción Audiovisual

SpainSEMINCI 2026 refuerza su programación de industria con laboratorios, encuentros y actividades formativas Producción Audiovisual