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

Thomas Fitzgerald PhotographySoftware

Photo Software News update for October 5th

10.05

There have been a few interesting developments in photography software over the past week, with Adobe introducing another way to edit photographs using generative AI, ON1 releasing a new version of…

Firmware & software AI in imaging Photo Software News News Lightroom DxO

Read at Thomas Fitzgerald Photography ↗

SoftwareDxO PhotoLab 10 released: adds depth-aware masking, colour grading and expanded AI tools Thomas Fitzgerald Photography

ReviewsFree software update turns Insta360’s tiny action camera into a full-fledged AI assistant that can do things most smart glasses can’t T3 cameras

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Photo Software News update for October 5th

Related

SoftwareDxO PhotoLab 10 released: adds depth-aware masking, colour grading and expanded AI tools Thomas Fitzgerald Photography

ReviewsFree software update turns Insta360’s tiny action camera into a full-fledged AI assistant that can do things most smart glasses can’t T3 cameras

TechAdobe Firefly AI will let you edit in creative software by just talking your way through it Digital Trends Photography

SoftwareLightroom for iPad Finally Gets Denoise Thomas Fitzgerald Photography

SoftwareAn Unusual Issue Slowing Down Lightroom Classic (And How I Fixed It) Thomas Fitzgerald Photography

SoftwareLightroom Classic 15.5 Released: Three new key features in this new release Thomas Fitzgerald Photography