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

Gold DerbyCinema

‘You Can See Everything’ finally takes No. 1 at the box office, slipping past ‘Clayface’ by $200K

11.02

The Elizabeth Holmes documentary led the lowest-grossing weekend since January.

Read at Gold Derby ↗

More from Gold Derby on Hot Shoe

CinemaSharon Horgan on ‘Youth’: ‘I’ve always had a reckless side to my personality’ Gold Derby

Cinema‘The Gilded Age’ cast members tease Season 4 — and share their ball gown bathroom hacks: ‘You have got to keep it breezy’ Gold Derby

CinemaHow ‘The Heart’ creative team brings a pulse to ‘The Pitt’-like medical musical Gold Derby

Cinema‘Romeo + Juliet’ at 30: How Baz Luhrmann avoided becoming a ‘Butcher of the Bard’ with his era-defining Shakespeare adaptation Gold Derby

CinemaFrom TV to the Tonys: Joe Keery, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Rachel Bloom may have acting honors in their futures Gold Derby

Cinema‘Saturday Night Live’: Tom Hanks returns as David S. Pumpkins, Inde Navarrette takes a swipe at Shane Gillis, and more best moments from Halloween episode Gold Derby

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest