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

Digital Camera WorldReviews

Pro photographer gets £5,000 of his gear seized by customs for not having this important document. What exactly is an ATA carnet, and why did he need one?

September 25

I can’t think of many situations more stressful for a professional photographer than having your equipment confiscated by authorities when you’ve got a client shoot coming right up.

Photographers

Read at Digital Camera World ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

Pro photographer gets £5,000 of his gear seized by customs for not having this important document. What exactly is an ATA carnet, and why did he need one?

Related

ReviewsTwo Ways AI Could Come for Wedding Photography Fstoppers

ReviewsLeica Lux 2.0 app brings a little Steve McCurry magic to your iPhone – shoot like a National Geographic photographer! Amateur Photographer

CinemaWood vs. Silicon Valley: A DIY Digital Bolex, OpenAI Buys the Portrait Mode Team – Focus Check ep135 CineD

ReviewsNikon Has Forgotten the Photographer Fstoppers

ReviewsThe incredible story of a lesbian photographer who fled the Nazis Amateur Photographer

ReviewsThree leading astrophotographers share their best shots – how they took them and why Amateur Photographer