I started using my camera to earn money while I was in high school, shooting local sporting events and working at a small-town newspaper darkroom. Back in those days I shot with an old Exacta film camera that had a brilliantly sharp Zeiss lens but no light meter. I used this camera for years, only giving it up when the pentaprism glass cracked. Since then, I have shot with a range of cameras from different manufacturers: Mamiya, Yashica, Canon, Minolta, and Nikon, to name a few.

Over the years I would return to photography time and again with varying degrees of seriousness, sometimes working for pay and sometimes not. I shot landscapes, weddings, theater, wildlife, and whatever else looked interesting at the time. It wasn't until after years of pushing numbers around in the business finance world and learning the gritty dynamics of business management that I began to examine photography as a serious career path. In 2011, I finally decided that I'd been in corporate-land quite long enough and switched to doing photography full-time. I moved to Seattle shortly thereafter because I have always loved the Northwest's natural beauty and diverse cultural and artistic heritage.

The name Chaucer Wells is a pseudonym that I invented for my artistic pursuits. It is taken from the names of two literary giants, Geoffrey Chaucer and H.G. Wells. My given name is Patrick.