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

The PlaylistCinema

Teyonah Parris Joins Denzel Washington In Christopher McQuarrie’s New Crime Thriller

11.06

Teyonah Parris is joining Denzel Washington in Christopher McQuarrie ’s untitled crime thriller for Amazon MGM Studios and United Artists .

Read at The Playlist ↗

More from The Playlist on Hot Shoe

Cinema‘The Further Mis-Adventures Of Cliff Booth’ New Trailer: Brad Pitt Navigates Hollywood’s Criminal Underworld In David Fincher’s Sequel The Playlist

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Teyonah Parris Joins Denzel Washington In Christopher McQuarrie’s New Crime Thriller

More from The Playlist on Hot Shoe

Cinema‘The Further Mis-Adventures Of Cliff Booth’ New Trailer: Brad Pitt Navigates Hollywood’s Criminal Underworld In David Fincher’s Sequel The Playlist

CinemaMatt Damon Wants Quentin Tarantino To Write A Movie For Him & Ben Affleck, Reveals He Turned Down ‘Ted’ The Playlist

CinemaParker Posey On Her Cherry Red Bell-bottoms, Passing On Auditions And The Choices Of ‘Wild Horse Nine’ [Interview] The Playlist

Cinema‘Get Huge: Looksmaxxing To Death’ Trailer: Hulu Investigates Extreme Biohacking, The Manosphere & Mysterious Deaths The Playlist

Cinema‘Get Rid Of It’: Daisy Ridley, Sosie Bacon & Simon Rex To Star In Ry Russo-Young’s Upcoming Road Trip Horror The Playlist

Cinema‘Black Doves’ Season 2 Review: Keira Knightley & Ben Whishaw Excel In Joe Barton’s Terrific, Fiercely Entertaining Return The Playlist