Here are a couple of the latest designs. These were inspired by a Polynesian God called the Tiki (according to ancient Polynesian legend the Tiki came from the stars and is the first man of the world). The four corners represent the four directions, with the top arrow representing “True North”. Let me know which one you all like the best and I will send that one off to the printers… Thanks…
Say hi to Baby Anthony… I am not quite sure how old he is in these pics, but i took these at a little get together we had for my birthday this May at Hector’s & Claudia’s place…He is such a great kid… so curious and inquisitive about everything around him… Without further adieu here is a few pics of Baby Anthony…
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Here are a few more pics in a Slide Show format…
I’ve been wanting to do some business cards for a while now, but just haven’t had the time to sit down and come up with a design & layout I was happy with. This last weekend i worked on it for a few hours and here is what i have so far. I was able to incorporate many of the design elements i wanted into the card.
– Star Trails : if you remember, a while ago i posted a blog entry called “So whats in a name???” on why i named my studio True North Studios. Capturing Star Trails using long exposure photography is a direct way to visually illustrate True North.
-New Logo : I’ve been trying to come up with a logo for some time. I wanted something that was simple and modern . I am not sure if this going to be my final logo yet, but this will have to do for now. North is usually denoted in maps and stuff with an arrow pointing straight up, but the slightly off-kilter arrow signifies True North.
– Bar code : I wanted to incorporate the Studio’s Facebook web address in the card, but it was ridiculously long and it would have ruined the look of the back of the card. The Bar codes is a modernistic way of incorporation the info into it and it is functional as well. if you have the proper app on your smart phones and you point your phone’s camera to it, it should take you to the studio’s FB page… or you can type it in your browser the old fashion way… LOL…
Anyhow, here it is (lets call it Version 1a, This version has many of the refinements and suggestions Miss Baby J. made…). The Two images are the front and back of the card. Let me know what you all think… The good, the bad and the ugly. I always appreciate your comments and idea.
Oh BTW… If you know of any good local or online printing shops, please let me know… I still need to get these things printed…
Stay tuned for lots of pics in the coming weeks and months….
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I’ve been meaning to go see Klea and her Mom and Dad ever since she was born a little over a year ago ( She just celebrated her first birthday just a few days ago :)) But with my crazy schedule, i only managed to get down there just a few weeks ago. It was really great to see everybody and catch up with good old friends… Although this was the first time I’ve seen her we become instant buddies. She is a great kid… Full of energy and always smiling … Without further adieu here are a few pictures of Princess Klea (this is what her Mom call her)…
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For more photos, please visit my Facebook Page @ http://www.facebook.com/pages/True-North-Studios/364264379851?v=wall
p.s. Donik Ala… I ‘ll Post some pics of Eliza in just a few days… I haven’t had time to edit all the pics yet…
Over the years I’ve had many good friends from the Wichita State’s Tennis team. We party a lot and hang out doing other stuff, but i don’t get to go the matches as much as I’d like to. I know for some of you this is the last semester officially playing tennis so i wanted take a few pics when i had the chance. This is only the first batch, and on this particular day i got there really late so i caught the tail end of only a couple of the matches.
Hopefully we can do a proper shoot of both the Mens and Womens teams one of these days soon…
Live, Breathe and Eat Tennis…
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#1 Fan…
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Keeping a watchful eye…
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Fans come in all shapes and sizes…
I went down to Miami for New Years this year. It was kind of sort a last minute trip, but it turned out be an amazing trip. Thank you Nephew and Andrea for being such gracious hosts and showing me a great time…
Here are a few of my favorite pics from this trip…
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Two weekends ago, Fahad asked Donald and I to tag along with him on a little road trip to Nebraska. At first this didn’t sound like it would be much of an interesting trip. But Donald and Fahad talked me into it by agreeing to stop by on the way back to take some pictures. Donald also mentioned there were some cool windmills somewhere along the route as well. So I figured, what the heck, and set off on the trip around 8:00 am Saturday morning… It was a dull and cloudy day and there was noting but flat featureless land mile after mile. But I did keep my eye open for little things here and there so we could stop by on the way back. These are a few of my favorite pics that came out of this little trip… (go to my 
page for more images from this trip)
I call this one “Little House on the Prairie“. I probably should have called it “A Little House on the Prairie 2010 “. The little stone house could very well be a couple of centuries old, but I doubt they had a 2.5 Mega Watt General Electric wind turbine back in the frontier days. The other thing I like about the image is the perfect positioning of the blades (I could say I timed it perfectly, but I didn’t. These things were spinning at almost full speed that day, I just got lucky with this shot)
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I call this one “Golden Prairie of the Future“. The landscape of these windswept prairies have seen many changes over the centuries. Hopefully this is going to be a much more common sight in the future, as wind power is one of the cleanest/greenest forms of energy… and wind is something we have in abundance in Kansas.
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I call this one “Creepy Barn“. Well may be it’s not that creepy. One of the things I really wanted to photograph on this trip was a real authentic living barn – one with pigs, cows and chickens and what not. Barn after barn, we couldn’t find one by the side of the road that fit the bill. But this one looked kind of interesting from a distance. However, by the time Fahad bought the car to a halt by the side of the road, on a pile of mud… we were probably a good half a mile from it. So I took off running towards it and Donald close behind, just to make sure a farmer with a shotgun didn’t come after us … LOL… Once I finally got on the farm , it was such a creepy feeling. With all the cut corn stalks and the abandoned barn, I felt like I was literally in the set of the “Texas Chain Saw Massacre” or something like that. Took a few shots and I was out of there.
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I call this one “Rusting Beauty“. So we were on our way back, and out of nowhere we saw this rusting steam engine sitting only a couple of yards from the highway. I still haven’t figured out the model or the age of this engine yet, but it certainly looks like it could be more than a century old. It was kind of sad to see such a majestic piece of engineering withering away, but there is beauty even in decay…
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This is the “Engine Bay” of this rusty old locomotive. This last year when I was traveling from Paris to Frankfurt on one their ultra modern ICE high-speed electric train, I got to ride pretty much shotgun the whole way back (it’s a long story). The only thing between me the train driver was an electro-translucent glass, and it was transparent for most of the trip, so i had a good view of the train control room. That thing resembled an aeroplane cockpit more than train engine room, full of LCD monitors, switches and buttons. I cannot even imagine how they managed to control a 100 Ton locomotive using only a few taps and valves back in those days…
These are a couple of rough drafts of the logo I’ve been working on. So what do you guys think ??? Any comments, suggestions, ideas or criticism would be appreciated…
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An extremely long exposure photograph of the night sky (photo credit liquidinplastic.com)
The first design was inspired by extremely long exposure photographs of the night sky. Due to the rotation of the earth each stars leaves a star trail (an arched line on the photograph), which combine to form concentric circles. Here is a example (This is not my photograph). The center of these circles points to True North…
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And here are a few more working files (Click on the thumbnails to enlarge them)…
One of the very first question many people ask me is, “So why did you name your studio True North?”
First of all I didn’t want to name my studio – Suraen Jothiratnam Photography, for obvious reasons… LOL… Even some of my closest friends I’ve known for years can’t still pronounce my last name correctly, but I can’t blame them… Can I… Hahaha…
So I started searching for a name that captured the essence of my photography. It turned out to be a much more daunting task than I initially anticipated. You will not believe the amount of time and energy I spent trying to come up with a name… I looked high and low, I looked at numerous names in numerous languages (Italian, French, Spanish, Greek, Latin, Tamil, Singhalese, Sanskrit to name a few). I am sure many of you even remember me asking for your suggestions.
In the end I chose “True North”, both for its simplicity and complexity. It is simple because its an easy name to remember, but is it wonderfully complex not only in its literal meaning but in its metaphorical meaning as well. I won’t bore you all with the scientific explanation of True North, but it is basically the northern point around which the earth spins (or the north plane of the axis of rotation of the earth). This is different from what most of us refer to as north – which refers to magnetic north. The difference between them, depending on which part of the world you are calculating it from is usually very small, but they are different. To me this represents the attention to detail I pay to my photographs, the way I try to capture the subtle details most people ignore, the different angles in which I compose my shots, or way in which I try to portray not just the physical beauty of a person but also the true beauty of a person as well .
I also love the metaphorical use of this phrase. Before the days of the GPS or even the invention of the compass, ancient sailors navigated the seas by following the stars in the night sky. The only star that sits still in the night sky is the North Star which closely lines up with True North. There is an ancient legend among sailors, on cloudy days and in treacherous seas, their one true love will be their true north and guide them safely home. I put my heart and soul into my work. I want my photographs to tell a story, to evoke an emotion, to provoke a thought, to question convention, to make you laugh, to make you cry, to make you fall in love with them…
So this is the story behind the name of my studio. As for the domain name of my site True-N.com, well all the regular iteration of the name you can think of were already taken.
Hopefully you get to visit my portfolio site, Flickr page, etc… I would love to hear your thoughts and interpretation of my images…
I know what some of you are thinking… but its not that kind of a blog !!! LOL… On a recent trip to Miami, I went to a gallery by one of the most renowned contemporary landscape photographers – Peter Lik. I was awestruck by the immensity of his photographers. Some of his photographs were 6 to 10 feet wide (not inches… but feet). Yea… his photographs are ridiculously expensive, but you do get truly immersed in them. Its not only because they are so large, but the level of detail in some of his photographs was simply mind-boggling.
Hopefully one of these days you will be able to see some of my work in a gallery on that scale … I was so inspired by his work, I’ve made some of the images in ultra wide format and made all the images on my portfolio site (www.true-n.com) as large as possible. To experience these images to their full extent on screen, find the biggest monitor you can get your hands on and then view the site in Full Screen Mode (in most browsers, you should be able to do this by simply clicking on the F11 key and once you are done click on the F11 key again to exit full screen mode).
True North's Blog 