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

PetaPixelReviews

The Tiny Head-Mounted Camera That Captured the World Cup Final Is Immortalized In a Museum

10.26

These days, it's not unusual for a referee in a professional sports match to wear a camera. The Premier League debuted it last year, and it's becoming increasingly common in other sports like…

Exhibitions & books

Read at PetaPixel ↗

Also covered by: CineD

ReviewsMagnum’s ‘Fact/Fiction’ Square Print Sale Lets You Buy Signed Prints From Famous Photographers PetaPixel

VFXBrad Bird, Travis Knight, Mel Brooks Set for Infinity Festival Animation World Network

CinemaToruńCAMERIMAGE to present Marshal of the Kujawy Pomorze Region Film Award to Maja Komorowska British Cinematographer

ReviewsQuick! Just one week to snap up these square prints from renowned Magnum photographers Digital Camera World

ReviewsUnder-14 photography winner captures the last rays of winter sunshine and turns them into magic – honored in major wildlife competition Digital Camera World

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest