“Hi, I’m Ron.”

“Mr. Ron, you’re next,” said Jessica, the manager of Maui Wound Care Clinic, with a smile.

The technicians helped me onto the gurney and rolled me into the narrow acrylic tube. For the next two hours, I would breathe one hundred percent oxygen in a hyperbaric chamber pressurized to the equivalent of being thirty-three feet underwater, a desperate attempt to push oxygen into my right foot. The goal was to save what the emergency vascular surgery had put at risk.

In early August 2025, a life-threatening pseudoaneurysm ruptured without warning. I was facing the threat of losing a few toes, a foot, or my leg from the knee down.

Two hours in a pressurized chamber of pure oxygen is a strange place to think about a career, either backwards or forwards. In the chamber, there is no phone, no email, and nothing to look at except for reruns of Yellowstone and Star Wars on leftover DVDs. For a few months after retiring, that was my office.

I retired a year ago on October 3rd. At first, you don’t know what to do with your time. That lasted about a week. I was back in a wheelchair. In business, every project, every event, and every task is a deadline. My new deadlines were being on time to the clinic or filing Medicare documents.

It was not the retirement I planned. It may have been the one I needed.

Retirement is an agenda without time constraints. No last-minute Teams meetings, no 2 a.m. calls with international clients. I don't miss that part, but I do miss the camaraderie with my business colleagues who challenged me to do my best work every hour of the day.

I’m calmer. I read more, and not just business or technology articles, but articles about art and psychology and ideas. Where a traditional PowerPoint presentation might have taken me 30 hours to prepare, I spent three months on my PhotoCON talks. That was a luxury.

The pressure to perform is now my pressure. My new goals are simple - editing and scanning through a half-million negatives I haven't looked at in forty years, and writing stories. I hope these stories can "pay it forward," as they say. So many wonderful people helped me throughout my career. It's the least I can do.

Every transition in my life has started at the edge - some by choice, and others involuntary. I traded a motorcycle for a Nikkormat at 16 and became a photographer. Stock photography pulled me out of the studio. Aerial cinematography pulled me off the ground. Lidar turned images into measurements. Each time, the old title stopped fitting before I knew what the new one was. Retirement is just the latest version. The difference is that this time nobody is handing me a business plan, including me.

A title is not an identity. For fifty years I introduced myself by my business card. I wasn’t Ron, I was Ron Chapple Photography or Thinkstock or Aerial Filmworks or GEO1 or NV5 Geospatial. Without a company, "what do you do?" got harder to answer, and more interesting.

Lying in that tube forced me to look backward for the first time. As an entrepreneur I spent every day putting one foot in front of the other. Now I'm excavating fifty years of work, one story at a time, and finding that the thread was never the gear. It was always the story. That was true in the darkroom, at 500 feet over a volcano, and it's true now as my words spill onto a Google Doc.

Transitions only look like a plan in retrospect.

I didn't set out to work in the geospatial sector, and it turned out to be some of the most rewarding work of my career. I didn't set out to spend year one in a wheelchair. Or lose a few toes.

What I can choose is where I put my attention. Speaking at PhotoCON and in sharing my archives, I've learned nostalgia is a powerful drug.

Year two has a direction, if not a destination. More writing. More talks. I'm not sure I ever stopped being a photographer. Now, my introduction is simple.

“Hi, I’m Ron.”