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

Sirui Aurora 35mm f/1.4 review: a moderately wide-angle lens with a smorgasbord of features and high-quality construction

11.06

I’ve been largely impressed with Sirui products over the years, and it’s been quite a few years at that. The company launched in 2001, becoming a well-known brand for tripods within five years.

Lenses Reviews

Read at Digital Camera World ↗

ReviewsLaowa 24mm f/2 Zero-D Tilt-Shift review: tilt, shift and full axis rotation for many and varied mirrorless cameras, and with no noticeable distortion Digital Camera World

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Sirui Aurora 35mm f/1.4 review: a moderately wide-angle lens with a smorgasbord of features and high-quality construction

Related

ReviewsLaowa 24mm f/2 Zero-D Tilt-Shift review: tilt, shift and full axis rotation for many and varied mirrorless cameras, and with no noticeable distortion Digital Camera World

NetherlandsFull Review Sony FE 100-400mm F5.6-8 OSS – lichte en compacte supertelezoom Camerastuffreview

ReviewsDxO ViewPoint 6 Review | Many Giant Leaps For Lens Corrections SLR Lounge

ReviewsSirui 40mm f2.2 Review: The Perfect Lens for Walking The Phoblographer

ReviewsSirui 20mm f2.4 Review: A Landscape Photographer’s Dream Lens The Phoblographer

ReviewsViltrox Air 40mm Review: Leica Q3 43 field of view on a budget Macfilos