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

Asian PhotographyIndia

Xiaomi UltraThin Magnetic Power Bank 5000 15W: When Thin Matters More Than Capacity

09.28

Xiaomi is taking a different approach with its new UltraThin Magnetic Power Bank 5000 15W. As the name suggests, its biggest USP isn't the battery capacity.

Smartphones

Read at Asian Photography ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Xiaomi UltraThin Magnetic Power Bank 5000 15W: When Thin Matters More Than Capacity

Related

ChinaHere’s first look at Huawei Mate 90 Pro Max teleconverter camera lens Huawei Central camera

ChinaHuawei Mate 90 Pro Max Collector’s Edition to feature 1-inch 10x teleconverter lens Huawei Central camera

ReviewsI used possibly the best smartphone camera system ever, and I didn't expect it to click like it did T3 cameras

ReviewsThis dual 200MP flagship is telling Samsung how to build the Galaxy S27 Ultra better Android Authority camera

ReviewsApple's new iPhone 18 Pro camera might be nice, but this lesser-known Chinese brand could have it beat T3 cameras

ChinaiPhone 18 Pro ranks 2nd on DXOMARK, Huawei Pura 80 Ultra remains at top Huawei Central camera