Introducing BANDUNG DAILY PHOTO

Written by Eki Qushay Akhwan

My appology for having neglected you for quite some time. I know you’ve been waiting for the new postings and probably wondering if this blog is still alive. I’d like to assure you, it is. I still keep notes of what I want to write and share with you, and you are still on my thoughts. Busy schedules at work, however, have somehow prevented me from seriously setting aside time to write. There are also a couple of new blogging projects which have pretty much occupied my spare time (not much, but yes, I still do have spare time): The first one is BANDUNG DAILY PHOTO, and the second a virtual gallery of my own – which I’d rather not reveal at this time as I’m still working on and tweaking it, but you’ll be the first to know when I eventually launch it.

Honestly speaking, the BANDUNG DAILY PHOTO project was inspired first and mostly by Santy’s JAKARTA DAILY PHOTO (JDP) whose success in rating and consistency of publishing one photo per day over a long stretch of time really deserve a salute. Not many Indonesian photo bloggers I know can do that. Then I also found that JDP is part of an international network of daily city blog aggregated in a portal called citydailyphoto, where I found that there were only a handful of Indonesian cities that were represented: Semarang (Semarang Daily Photo), Yogyakarta (Jogja Portrait), Palembang (Palembang Daily Photo), Medan (Medan Daily Photo), Bogor (Bogor Daily Photo), Bali (2 blogs), Cibubur, Bekasi, and of course Bandung.

Bandung had actually had three daily photo blogs when I was considering to start mine: one seems to be dormant, and the other two were spasmodic (not posting regularly). Of these latter two, Bunyamin Najmi’s Bandung Raya blog was spasmodic, posting only about one or two photos a month, and the pictures posted were not consistently about Bandung (some of the pictures were about Jogja, for example). The other, Harry Makertia’s Imagi Bandung, had also seemed to be in a long slumber. I thought this was not good. As one of Indonesia’s biggest and most prominent cities, Bandung deserves a better representation within the international community of daily city photo bloggers, and as a photographer (well, self-proclaimed photographer) and resident of Bandung I naturally have a good number of Bandung-related photo collections. Armed with a conviction that I could post one decent picture a day for years ahead, I launched the the project.

The project is now almost one-month old and, I can confidently say, has had good reactions from other daily city photo bloggers around the world. (My great thanks to those who have stopped by my BANDUNG DAILY PHOTO, left encouraging comments, and provided generous links to their blogs.) There has also been some positive side effects of my blog’s presence. Imagi Bandung has since been reawakened and posting daily as it is supposed to be. Within this past month, I’ve also seen new citydaily photobloggers emerging from the other parts of the country: Hendrawan’s Riau Daily Photo is one of those that I think will be a serious new comer, having not missed a posting a day since it was launched.

I sincerely hope that more and more Indonesian cities will participate in the city daily photo blogs in the future. Big cities like Jakarta and Bandung certainly can have more than one blog representing them as many other cities do. Although there are already three active city daily photo bloggers covering Bandung, I believe each of us is unique in our perspectives and complement one another in giving a better overall picture of the city.

More story on city daily photo blog later.

Enjoy your day!