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.