Fatma

There is a third option on many cameras that is worth knowing about because it is often the best default: electronic first curtain.

It starts the exposure electronically and ends it with the mechanical shutter. That removes the vibration from the shutter opening, which is the part that causes shutter shock - while keeping a mechanical closing, which avoids most rolling shutter effects.

The catch is that at very fast shutter speeds with a wide aperture it can produce uneven exposure or oddly shaped out-of-focus highlights, because the electronic start and mechanical finish do not travel identically.

So a reasonable set of defaults:

• Electronic first curtain for most work.
• Full mechanical for very fast speeds with fast lenses, and whenever you use flash.
• Fully electronic for silence, and for static subjects where vibration matters.
• Avoid fully electronic for fast motion and under artificial lighting.

The other half is worth saying: let them come, and be pleased about it.

Somebody crossing a field to check on a motionless stranger is doing something good. Being briefly interrupted by that is a small price, and the alternative: a world where nobody checks: is much worse.

What I do is acknowledge early. As soon as I notice somebody looking, I raise a hand or call out that I am fine and taking pictures. That resolves it at fifty metres instead of at two, costs nothing, and usually gets a laugh.

A large proportion of the people who come over turn out to be interested in what you are photographing, and some of the best conversations I have had in the field started exactly this way.

On the frustration about colours shifting, which is the real question underneath: the conversion is not the only culprit, and understanding what is lost helps.

The two gamuts overlap but neither contains the other. A screen can show saturated blues and greens that no ink set can reach. Print can produce some yellows and warm tones that a screen struggles with. So the conversion is not simply a reduction, it is a mapping between two differently shaped spaces.

What actually helps in practice:

• Calibrate the screen, so what you see is a known quantity rather than whatever the panel does.
• Soft proof against the specific paper and printer profile before printing, so you see the shifts on screen first.
• Expect the saturated blues to move. That is the single most common surprise, and no amount of adjustment recovers a colour the inks cannot make.

The file staying in RGB until the last moment is correct, incidentally. Converting early throws away information that the printer's own conversion could have used.