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

CineDCinema

Atomos Shinobi 7 II & Shogun AV-19M Introduced – First Look

September 18

At IBC 2026, Atomos was showcasing its new Shinobi 7 II and the Shogun AV-19M, a slim, lightweight, and bright 7-inch HDMI on-camera monitor and a stripped-down version of its 19-inch rack-mountable…

Video & streaming Reviews Trade shows News Accessories Ethernet atomos

Read at CineD ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

Atomos Shinobi 7 II & Shogun AV-19M Introduced – First Look

Related

CinemaIBC 2026 Overview & Best-of-Show Winners | iPhone 18 Pro Gets a Variable Aperture | Teradek Bolt 7 – Focus Check ep134 CineD

CinemaOWC Thunderbolt 5 Dock with Dual HDMI Introduced – Two HDMI 2.1 Ports, 140W Laptop Charging, Full-Speed Downstream Storage CineD

Cinemaiodyne Brings Smarter, More Secure Edge Storage to IBC 2026 ProVideo Coalition

VideoNAB Leadership Foundation Announces 2027 Broadcast Leadership Training Class TV Technology

ReviewsCanon’s entry-level full-frame camera is more capable than ever: here’s our first look video DPReview

VideoFour Themes That Defined the 2026 IBC Show TV Technology