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

CineDCinema

Sony ECM-AX10 Spatial Audio Microphone for Smartphones Announced – Four Capsules, Ambisonics and Binaural, Eclipsa Audio Export

October 14

S Sony has introduced the ECM-AX10, a 24g / 0.85oz USB-C microphone that plugs straight into a smartphone and records spatial audio with four omnidirectional capsules.

Read at CineD ↗

Also covered by: Videomaker

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Sony ECM-AX10 Spatial Audio Microphone for Smartphones Announced – Four Capsules, Ambisonics and Binaural, Eclipsa Audio Export

More from CineD on Hot Shoe

CinemaAccsoon CineView M7 Series Gains Community-Built Camera Control Apps for Selected Panasonic and Nikon RED Cameras CineD

CinemaGetty Images to File for Bankruptcy Protection – Debt Cut, Private Ownership, No Change for Contributors CineD

CinemaGoPro MISSION 1 Series Update Released – Zero-Lag Shutter, Continuous 50MP RAW Photos and Anamorphic Lens Support CineD

CinemaPanasonic LUMIX S9 Firmware 2.1 Now Available – 4K60 in MP4 (Lite), More Lens Fn Options, and LUMIX Flow Support CineD

CinemaA Pocket Camera at the Venice Film Festival – What DJI Wants With the Osmo Pocket 4P CineD

CinemamacOS 27 Golden Gate for Video Editors – Is It Safe to Update Yet? CineD