Frames Two running pieces Revised when the counts change
Screenshot Quarterly mark Screenshot Quarterly Games, framed

A review can only describe one game. These two pieces count across every game the publication has logged, which is where the findings live.

Both pieces

Counting across games rather than within one

Each piece is revised as new frame logs arrive, and each carries the specific evidence that would overturn it. One of the two has already been narrowed once.

A vast pale salt flat under high overcast with a single dark upright post at the centre casting a long shadow toward the viewer
Essay · 14 games · 62 kept frames

In Defence Of The Almost Empty Frame

The frames that survive a week have consistently less in them than the frames that do not, and photo modes are almost universally built to encourage the opposite. Fourteen games' worth of counting, and one narrowing.

14 gamesNarrowed onceOpen
An overhead view of a printed contact sheet of small frames with a brass loupe, a pencil and a notebook of composition sketches
Survey · 19 games

The Golden Hour Problem

Nineteen games with a time-of-day control, and in seventeen of them a single forty-minute window produces the majority of usable frames. What that concentration says about the rest of the day.

19 gamesTwo revised in a patchOpen
Standing figures

What both pieces currently rest on

Summarised so the direction of the counting is visible without reading either piece in full.

GameIssueToolsWorldFramesKept
Glasshouse Rose111921410.3%
Harbour Watch10793409.1%
Copper Quarter9392218.6%
Salt Line1156988.2%
Moss And Marble11872677.9%
Fallow Season9281687.1%
Winter Aerodrome10481956.7%
Ninth Precinct11491566.4%
Tallow Row10862825.7%
Switchback Pass11683884.1%
Nine Bridges9854043.7%
Deep Field10936122.0%
Ridge And Wire91035331.9%
Causeway11949011.2%

Sort that table by tools and it looks like noise. Sort it by world, as it is sorted above, and it is almost monotonic: every game scoring eight or nine for its world sits in the top eight rows, and every game scoring three or four sits in the bottom three.

The strongest single line in the table is the bottom one against the top one. Causeway has nine for tools and four for world and keeps one frame in eighty. Glasshouse Rose has one for tools and nine for world and keeps one frame in ten. That is the whole publication in two rows, and the essay is an attempt to say why more carefully than that.

What the table cannot show is the interaction, which is where Moss And Marble matters. It is the only game in fourteen where a specific tool — a 135mm lens — measurably rescued frames that would otherwise have failed, and its internal figures rise from 1.8 per cent at the wide end to 16.7 at the long. Tools are not irrelevant. They are just enormously less important than a sky that changes.

Across all logs

4772frames logged to date

Fourteen games across three issues, every frame recorded at the time of capture and reviewed a week later.

Kept by world score

World 8–97.8%
World 6–76.4%
World 3–52.2%

Median kept ratio within each band. The gap between the top two bands is small; the gap to the third is not.

Kept by tools score

Tools 8–103.7%
Tools 5–76.4%
Tools 1–47.1%

Inverted, which is the finding that started the essay and the one most likely to be an artefact of how frames get taken.