I have been a photographer for 25 years. I operated my business, Ron Smith Color Printing in Pasadena from 1993 to 2002. I have been a newspaper photographer, shot advertising, industrials, public relations, movie stills, and even portraits and weddings. I was the first staff photographer for Focus on the Family, a Christian ministry that published fourteen national publications, produced films and a national radio program. I was their photographer for 2 1/2 years. I also have worked at many professional photo labs; Consolidated Media services, in Pasadena; Photo Impact, Nardulli and Quantity Photo in Hollywood. I was also the darkroom assistant for Life Magazine photographer Leigh Wiener.

I completed my M.A. in Art Education in 2002. My thesis project involved 360-degree photography, printed life-size in a circle, creating an environment that viewers stand inside. I have been photographing in panorama for fifteen years, beginning with the widelux, continuing with a turn-of-the-century 8 X 20 inch banquet camera, and most recently with a 4 X 10 inch wide-field camera, and the 360 camera.

My experience is more than I could have received at any university. I have extensive knowledge of b&w and color film, from a structural level to developing and printing. I have single-handedly re-introduced black & white slides and color infrared into the professional photographic scene in Los Angeles. I have taught workshops in platinum and palladium printing, and my prints are known to be among the finest made. I have printed in many antique processes, such as albumen, carbon, salt printing, cyanotype and Polaroid transfer. I am an expert in Photoshop as well, seamlessly combining mature and emerging technologies. I have advised professional photographers far more than I have advised students. My clients work in advertising, editorial, fashion, sports, industrial, fine art and portraiture. Former teachers have become friends and colleagues, and we have shared secrets of photography's past together.

I became a teacher by accident. I had been running my one-man photo lab in Pasadena for about 5 years, working with professional photographers and cinematographers solving one-off custom problems, when a customer asked me to cover a Saturday class he was teaching at Santa Monica College. I liked it so much, that I set about finding what it took to teach there on a regular basis. They said I needed a Bachelor's degree to get the job, so I went back to school to get one. It was 1998. I was 41 years old.

Along the way I earned my Master's Degree in Art Education. My work was in photography, specifically panoramic images. Using a 360 degree camera, I made photographs in crowded areas. I then enlarged the photos to approximately fourteen feet long and two feet high, mounted them in an enclosure that resembled the shape of a nautilus, and invited people "in" to experience my photographs. The effect was quite spectacular! You can see some of my panoramic images at

http://im8x10.com/pages/panoramas/panoramas.html

Ironically, while I had been working in traditional photographic methods for many years, I found that it would be necessary to enlarge my panoramas digitally, mostly because of the size I wanted to end up with. Accordingly, I got a computer and taught myself everything there was to know about Photoshop and digital printing. When my advisers at California State University at Northridge heard what I was doing, they asked me to teach Photoshop at the university, which I did for almost three years. During the whole process, I had become a teacher at Maclay Middle School in Pacoima in order to pay my way. I was in the LAUSD District Intern Program, which I completed concurrent with my graduate studies. By the time earned my master's and my teaching credential, I decided I liked working in public education, ultimately turning down a position at Santa Monica College. 

Fast forward to today. I now teach full-time at Helen Bernstein High School, and I am working on my doctorate in educational technology at Pepperdine University (I'm beginning my dissertation and should be finished this year. More on this later.). I have about 170 students (depending on which day you ask) and my studies require me to be away from time to time, so I had to come up with a way to keep up with my kids, even if I was not present. What I started doing is teaching all of my classes through my website, http://im8x10.com/nma. I post the day's agenda, the Daily Memo; I post all assignments for download or web viewing, depending on the nature of the assignment; I have a help page where students may e-mail me directly, no matter where I am. I have also established e-mail addresses for all of my students so that we can remain in contact at all times.

I teach all manner of digital manipulation applications, from Photoshop to Dreamweaver to Final Cut Pro. My students begin as novices, and after one year, can design and publish an entire website. I have them do what I call a fire drill. At the beginning of the hour, I give them text, graphics, and links, and the assignment is to produce a fully functioning website in one hour! At first, there is panic, but after one week of this, they can easily accomplish the task. It has proven very useful to some of them. They have gotten jobs based on their ability to create on the spot.

Since I also teach digital video, I’m very proud of a couple of my students who were accepted into Inner City Filmmakers. It is a non-profit organization that helps get under privileged youth into the movie business.
I let students design assignments, establish goals, and assess outcomes. This lets students play to their strengths, allows them a level of success, and keeps them in school. We talk about what it means to have an effective web page, or 1 minute commercial, or CD ROM.

Additionally, I have taken a cue from Marc Prensky of MIT, and started leveraging the kids cell phones as a tool for my classes. We actively text message all day to keep up with each other. We use the website when I'm in school or not. Similarly, students can access all of the class work even they are absent. So like my introduction to teaching, my move to online resources was born out of necessity.

I have two goals as a teacher––to graduate seniors and to get them into college. In 2005 I had 21 seniors. All of them graduated and all of them are presently attending a college or university.

Currently, I am in the dissertation phase of my doctoral studies in Educational Technology at Pepperdine University. My study will look at a school in Arizona that decided to forgo purchasing textbooks in favor of putting a laptop computer in the hands of every student. With all the talk of one to one computing, I'd like to see if it really works to improve student achievement.

With that in mind, I am converting an entire middle school in Hawthorne, CA to Linux. At Dana Middle School, with its 800 students, I have installed a new computer lab with 36 newly formatted computers (we went live last fall). This will be the trial for acceptance of Linux at the school, with the goal of schoolwide change on the near horizon. My long-term goal is to achieve one-to-one computing at Dana. This will not happen in the next six months, or within the scope of my own studies, but rather, this is a project that will span the next few years. It may be that we will be able to outfit students in the lower grades, and as they move up, we will repeat the process. We will have to see what works.
 
Whatever form it takes, it is like the old joke, “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time!” This is my first bite. Others have taken bites, too, and as more of us chew, this dream will become a reality.