About Tad Doxsee

Click on photo for larger image.

It is late and you are alone in an empty, quiet sea of cubicles.

Your coworkers have headed home and you are left with the quiet hum of your computer, the clicking of your fingers on the keyboard and the looming deadline that is keeping you at work in the middle of the night.

For Tad Doxsee, a 48-year-old software engineer at PTC in Santa Clara, working late feels like "your brain is detached from the rest of your body."

The blank, driven and desperate expression he captured in "My Head Among the Cubes" is his own.

And it was not easy to come by since Doxsee was the man both behind and in front of the camera.

To achieve the image he wanted, Doxsee had to set a timer and then run around the cubicles to stand in the right place.

"I didn't know what the expression was until I was developing the film," he said.

This picture strays from Doxsee's typical subjects. He said that he never photographs himself and rarely shoots other people.

"My family would tell you I take pictures of rocks and trees, mostly," he said.

Photography has been a hobby for the 20-year Palo Alto resident ever since he was a kid.

"I was always the guy who had the camera, nothing too serious," Doxsee said.

Only recently did he decide to learn how to master black-and-white darkroom technique by taking a class at the Palo Alto Adult School.

"I've been trying to spend more time taking pictures," he said.

This year is his first win in the Weekly's photo contest.

--Molly Tanenbaum