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

RedShark NewsCinema

After Effects AI Assistant enters public beta

September 18

Adobe's AI Assistant for After Effects has reached public beta, reading entire projects to reorganize files, write expressions, and fix broken rigs. The live demo on the IBC show floor was impressive.

AI in imaging Post & VFX Adobe After Effects IBC2026

Read at RedShark News ↗

ReviewsPhotoshop’s AI Assistant feels made for beginners – so now the tool is coming to the newbie-friendly Photoshop Elements image editor too Digital Camera World

ReviewsForget variable aperture and folding phones – as a photographer, the reason I want an iPhone 18 Pro is this hidden anti-AI camera tool Digital Camera World

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

After Effects AI Assistant enters public beta

Related

ReviewsPhotoshop’s AI Assistant feels made for beginners – so now the tool is coming to the newbie-friendly Photoshop Elements image editor too Digital Camera World

ReviewsForget variable aperture and folding phones – as a photographer, the reason I want an iPhone 18 Pro is this hidden anti-AI camera tool Digital Camera World

ReviewsMeta’s Oversight Board Orders the Company to Remove Deepfake Videos From Facebook PetaPixel

CinemaSIRUI Aurora 15mm f/1.6 and 24mm f/1.4 Full-Frame Autofocus Lenses Unveiled CineD

CinemaDaVinci Resolve 21.1 Uses MCP to Let AI Assistants Control the Edit Y.M.Cinema

ReviewsThe Fun in Multiple Exposure Portraits The Phoblographer