Dear you,
If you want to understand how we started with Truly Yours, it didn’t start with a wedding. It started with with a Shashti celebration, four years ago, in a temple hall in Sirsi.
At the time, I was shooting as Sharath Padaru Photography, working alongside the team at 50mm Studios. The occasion was family. My wife’s parents, Geeta and Sridhar Bhat, were marking their Shashtyabdapoorti, the ceremony that honours sixty full years of a life and, with it, a marriage performed all over again. Sixty years is the point where the old calendar completes one whole turn and begins fresh. So the couple sits together once more, garlanded, and takes their vows again in front of the children and grandchildren who were not around the first time. It is a wedding and a homecoming folded into one long day.
Because it was family, something shifted. Nobody was watching us the way a client watches a vendor. There was no template we owed to a contract, no safe version anyone would hold us to. We had the whole hall, the whole day, and, for once, full permission to be wrong. Suman Hope, our cinematographer and editor, took that permission and used every inch of it.
Here is the honest part. We had always leaned toward the real stuff. Even in those years we would drift from what a wedding film “was supposed to be” and reach for the true thing underneath. But our own insecurity kept pulling us back into safe frames and format because safe is what people expected and safe is what gets approved. Sirsi was the day the shackles came off. With family in front of the lens and nothing to prove to a client, Suman finally let the instinct run all the way out.
He caught things at the speed they actually happened. He let the energy of the room lead the camera instead of forcing the room to hold still for it. He let the sound in, the real texture of the day, the kind most wedding films quietly delete. When you watch it, you notice you are hearing the event before you have finished looking at it.
I will be straight with you about what I see when I watch it now, four years on, because I would rather be honest than flattering about our own work. It was not more polished than our other work. In places it was rougher. But it was awake in a way the polished films never were. There is a lot of wide angle in it, far more than we would ever use today. Our storytelling has refined a great deal since, and it will keep refining, because craft is a thing that never stops moving. But none of that is why I still love this film. What holds a film together is simpler and harder to earn: the people in it still feel real. The essence Suman caught that day has not aged. That is the whole lesson. Technique will always improve and then date, but the emotional connection is the part you are actually chasing, and it is the only thing that keeps a piece of work worth returning to years after it was made. This was the first time we reached for that instead of for a pretty postcard, and once you have seen through that window, you cannot unsee it.
That day is the quiet origin of everything we do now under Truly Yours. The line we eventually landed on, “for those who choose real over reel, ” was not a marketing idea we reverse engineered. It was a lesson that temple hall taught us before we had the words for it.
There is one more reason I am starting the whole blog here, with my own family, and it is the most important one. Showing you my people, on my in-laws' most tender day, is me going first. It is me opening my door before I ask you to open yours. The only way we can catch the real you is if you let us all the way in, if you are willing to be as unguarded in front of us as this family was in front of Suman. I cannot ask that of you and stay hidden myself. So here I am, family and all.
Which brings me to why this page exists.
The world has gotten fast, and I am not here to scold it. Nine seconds, a trending sound, a swipe, gone. You have probably seen our reels. What you may not know is that a reel of ours is never a thing we made on its own. It is a slice we lift out of a full film, one window into a longer story that already exists in one piece. The film is the real work. The reel is only a doorway to it.
Postscripts is for the parts that do not fit through that doorway. The reason a sixty year old marriage still holds. Why a family drives back to the same ancestral house every summer. What a cinematographer is chasing when he finally puts down the safe shot. You cannot reach the bottom of any of that in nine seconds. You have to sit with it.
So some of these letters will be about weddings and many will not. There is a village Ramotsava I want to tell you about. An old family house in Padaru. A photoshoot with Rukmini. A walk to Everest Base Camp that had nothing to do with anyone’s marriage and everything to do with how we learned to look. It will wander, on purpose, the way a good postscript at the bottom of a letter often carries the thing you actually meant to say.
I know this runs against the current. Everyone is being told to be shorter, faster, louder. I am choosing, quietly, to go deeper instead, and to do it in writing, which is about the least fashionable format I could have picked. That is rather the point.
If the films are how we show you what we saw, these letters are where I tell you why it was worth seeing.
I am glad you are here.
Yours truly, Sharath Padaru
The film that started it: “60th Shashti Abda Poorti, ” shot as Sharath Padaru Photography with 50mm Studios. Camera and edit by Suman Hope.
