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

Camera DecisionReviews

All 24 of Our Photography Tools Now Live on One Page

September 17

We have been building small tools for years, and they ended up scattered across the site. Some of you found the depth of field calculator and never knew the golden hour one existed.

BLOG

Read at Camera Decision ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

All 24 of Our Photography Tools Now Live on One Page

More from Camera Decision on Hot Shoe

ReviewsPanasonic S 20mm F2.5 vs 18-40mm F4.5-6.3: Same Size, and the Zoom Is the Better Buy Camera Decision

ReviewsSony A6700 Alternatives: Its Top Rival Is the Full Frame A7C II, and Readers Split Almost Evenly Camera Decision

ReviewsSongRaw AF 50mm F1.2 MS and AF 85mm F1.2 MS Cost $549 and $649, About Half the Moonlit Price Camera Decision

ReviewsPanasonic Lumix S9 Firmware 2.1 Arrives October 13 With 4K 60p MP4 (Lite), and a Flash Fix for the S1 II Camera Decision

ReviewsRicoh GR IV 30th Anniversary Edition Kit Is Official: 6,000 Units, From 21 October Camera Decision

ReviewsCanon Patented a 180-590mm f/6.5 Internal Zoom, the 600mm Zoom Canon RF Is Missing Camera Decision