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

LomographyFilm

A Day With Taiwanese Breakdancer Quake: Getting Better and Learning to Appreciate One's Self More

September 15

Breakdancing athlete Sun Chen, a.k.a. Quake, shares his daily life after the Paris Olympics, captured with the Lomo'Instant Automat Glass.

Read at Lomography ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

A Day With Taiwanese Breakdancer Quake: Getting Better and Learning to Appreciate One's Self More

More from Lomography on Hot Shoe

FilmWhat Happened to My Photos? — A Beginner's Guide to Common Film Photography Mistakes Lomography

FilmChasing the Subtle Poetic Quality of Film: Taiwanese Photographer Jon Li with the Half-frame Simple Use Reloadable Film Camera Lomography

FilmThe Places We Call Home: Ala Kheir on the Sudan Family Archives Lomography

FilmDecorating the Lomo'Instant Automat With My Colors: Artist BOM’s Custom Camera & Colorful Album of June Memories Lomography

FilmFalling for Half-Frame (Again) – A Half-frame Simple Use Reloadable Film Camera Review by @mackiechartres Lomography

FilmHarris Tomlinson-Spence Captures Nothing But Thieves on the Half-frame Simple Use Reloadable Film Camera Lomography