Ismawan was born in Cottesloe, Australia, in 1972, the first of three sons. Back to Indonesia at his early age, he spent his childhood in Malang, a small town in East Java province, Indonesia, until his high school time. That was when he became interested in photography and started using his father’s pocket camera to take pictures. He moved and finished his college in Surabaya, majoring in computer engineering, before starting to move from one assignment to another in various companies and cities in Indonesia. By then he also started to travel around Indonesia and perpetuated the beauty of places in Indonesia using his photography skill. Between those assignments and trips, he still managed to complete his MBA degree at ITB Bandung. Beside photography as his greatest passion and hobby, Ismawan also loves doing golf, tennis, trekking and diving, and always eager to try out any other outdoor activities.

It all started when Ismawan found a Kodak pocket camera in the closet, a camera that was bought by his father but rarely used. Soon, his time and attention were fully occupied by the new toys, tried to compose images as he visualized them in his mind. Film processing was not a cheap stuff, especially for a high school student, so he had to be careful and very economical with the film he had. He had to wait until he earned his own money before he can buy himself a ‘real’ camera. Nikon FM10 with 35-70mm kit lens was his first decent SLR camera, in fact this was his only film SLR camera until he moved to digital in 2005. With his first SLR camera plus few more lenses he bought, he started taking pictures of places he visited when he traveled around Indonesia. During those trips, his interest toward landscape & human interest photography grew. Moving to digital gave him more freedom to play with the images during post-processing. He finds it interesting, however his focus is still on how to produce a good base picture where he decide later whether it is best to leave it as it is or post-process it afterwards.

Ismawan never got any formal education in photography. He learned by himself, read lots of articles in the internet, and joined some photography communities to gain knowledge and skills from other fellow photographers. He was also a chairman of the photography community at Freeport Indonesia, his latest assignment where he works as Superintendent – MIS Wireless Infrastructure, and he organized photography events, arranged joint exhibitions between community members, and invited renowned and distinguished photographers from other part of Indonesia to share their knowledge and exposure with the growing photography community in Freeport work area. His dream is to have his solo exhibition that show the beauty of Indonesia that is captured by his camera, and even publish a photo-book about Indonesia landscape, later on.