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

Smartphone photography (GSMArena)Tech

vivo V80 hands-on and camera samples from Bangkok, Thailand

September 24

vivo will unveil the V80 in India on October 6 at 12 PM local time. It will come in three colors: Sunrise Anthem, Horizon Blue, and Stellar Black.

Smartphones Reviews news

Read at Smartphone photography (GSMArena) ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

vivo V80 hands-on and camera samples from Bangkok, Thailand

Related

ReviewsiPhone 18 Pro camera reviews are in. Here’s what photographers need to know DPReview

TechXiaomi Pad 9 Pro and Pad 9 announced Smartphone photography (GSMArena)

TechThe pricey 1TB and 2TB iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max found to use very slow memory Smartphone photography (GSMArena)

TechXiaomi 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max arrive with latest Snapdragon chips, privacy displays and more useful rear screens Smartphone photography (GSMArena)

TechThe Huawei Watch D3 is now available in Europe, comes with a free smart bathroom scale Smartphone photography (GSMArena)

ReviewsNikon Z5 IIC Review: Smaller, Prettier, and Mostly Capable PetaPixel