Pikachu Makes For the Very Best Hot Shoe Cover, and I Had to Catch Them All

Recently, I’ve been going through the Phoblographer’s archives looking for fun ideas and then I ran into our coverage of the Artisan Obscura hot shoe covers a long time ago. Looking around the web, I found a ton of other fun options — and so I searched for the one my heart desired. Pikachu is by far not my favorite Poke’mon, but I still absolutely adore the franchise despite how rigged I think the video games are right now. Ultimately, I couldn’t resist the Pikachu hot shoe cover I found online. So I had to catch them all.

When the little adorable hot shoe covers came in, I was delighted to see that they’d been packed so carefully and nicely in a way that none of them moved or smashed into one another. Then I picked one up. It’s large for a hot shoe cover, but it’s also made of a hard rubber. This rubber slides easily into the hot shoes of Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fujifilm, Leica, and Panasonic cameras. Better yet, it doesn’t slide out easily. That’s because it’s a bit chub, like the glorious Pikachu. Sometimes these won’t cover the entire hot shoe though — so there’s a chance that if you’re making photos in the rain that some moisture or dust could get in. But my best guesstimate is that it’s very slight because of how small the uncovered area is. As long as you’re also using a weather resistant camera and you’re practicing good judgment when using the camera, you should be fine. Lucky for you, back in 2020 I wrote an entire guide to shooting photos in the rain and weather-checking your gear. You can find that guide here at this link.

Created by ACNH Studio, I was pleasantly surprised to find these. But at the same time, I also know that some of the best stuff in the photo industry comes from really small studios. For example, Phoblographer was one of the first publications to put Tap and Dye on the map for other photographers. Then everyone else caught on. Like Tap and Dye, ACNH Studio is bound to become insanely popular once all the influencers, Youtubers, F Sloppers, and Pet ur Pickle copy us. That’s for good reason too — in their shop, there are lots of other characters that photographers can buy for their hot shoe.

This, to me, is really adorable, and fun. Some folks like to do photography alone. But when Pikachu is in the hot shoe, I can think of it kind of like an adorable little companion. It’s similar to high tea culture where the ateliers will have something called a Tea Pet. Every now and again, they pour tea out onto the tea pet. But in my case, I’d just be enjoying my hot shoe companion and putting him in my pocket at times — therefore achieving the dream of the Pocket Monsters idea of Poke’Mon.

This custom-made Pikachu Hot Shoe Cover can be found on ACNH Studio’s Etsy site. There you can peek at (pun intended) a bunch of other fun things. And they retail for just under $20 right now. Yes, I bought like 7 of them. I regret nothing.