Easter Bonnet 2009

I shot the Second Annual Easter Bonnet event last Sunday. Fantastic is an understatement. The yearly event is to raise money for St. Therese Center for AIDS.

Thanks to Kristen Hertzenberg Satterwhite, who invited me to photograph for her extremely informative blog called Broadway Vegas, I was able to shoot the behind the scenes as well as the show. Two wonderful men who's names have unfortunately passed me, helped me to get settled when I first arrived during the rehearsal. Thanks to them I was granted my very own platform where I was able to set up my tripod and shoot the entire event in the middle and back of the room, but above the audience. I felt like a queen with a third eye.

When I first began shooting all the performers getting ready I must admit that it made me miss Chicago and Mass a lot. The energy and vitality of everyone reminded me of all the people I have been fortunate enough to meet along my path. The behind the scenes has always been, but since I moved here to Henderson I have experienced minimal amounts of active, vibrant, and youthful artists and performers. It was a wonderful feeling to know it exists here and I hope to surround myself with people who are active in making beautiful art and performance happen.

I especially enjoy as much flamboyance and weirdness as possible so I love love loved the Cirque team. There was a very familiar energy within that room that I fed off of. It reminded me of the Jimmy Johns Boys in Chicago: Lance, Mo, John, Chuckles, Russ, Darcy (we were the boys too so it still counts as boys), Izzy, Transmission Gallery and all the rest of the adventure. It made me want to be a part of what they were doing. Not to mention they were entertaining my camera so vividly; I had to hold in my laughter in order to get the shots. For those of you who know that I want the Cirque shows to get involved in my Recycle Paper Sculpture Project know I was going crazy with visual plans of how I will cast everyone together. It will be so much fun! My mind was going wild! Experiencing these specific performer's energy made me think its a little more possible then I thought before.

The Sopranos were there as well. They always crack me up because of my own ghetto mouthed upbringing from Massachusetts. Of course the accent and mannerisms they're replicating is different then Mass, but its more similar then the Chicago or here. Not to mention that when they really go on their f-bomb rampages and picking on one another during their show it sounds like the regular vocabulary that goes back and forth between my mom and sister.

It was great to finally hear Kristen sing; even though it wasn't Phantom and it only lasted a few seconds. Phantom will be one of the next shoes I see. The Phantom performance at Easter Bonnet was awesome. The costume for the performer wearing the bonnet was by far the hottest one. I loved their bonnet. The whole performance was bad ass in a nice neat package.

Well, I think I've finished my excited rant for now. There are endless possibilities for another revise, but we'll see. I hope you enjoy the photos.






That was before the show. Woh!



And that's it.

Art of Love won the competition, close call because there were 3 ties for 2nd place and 2 ties for runners up. Congrats to everyone.

Visit Broadway Vegas for more info on upcoming events: broadwayvegas.blogspot.com

Melange Jewelry Shoot 2

When I shot Melange Jewelry's wonderful gems a few months back, Rachelle wasn't 100% satisfied with them, so of course I wanted to re-shoot to make sure that she receives something she feels great about. We didn't do all of them because she's going to test what looks best on her website: the photos from the last shoot or the new ones on black.

What do you think?

I like the black ones a lot. The reflection really creates a warmth depth to each of them.



And then here's another one that we both loved, but didn't fit with the rest because it was horizontal.



Melange Jewelry
www.dezinediva.com

And now that I see them on a black backdrop, i can see that they need a little more editing. Well, here's the point, they'll be replaced soon.

Bake Sale for Wear Recycle

Hi Everyone,

I will be having a bake sale at Third Thursday to help pay for my Wear Recycle project.

You can find info on the project at nickywatts.blogspot.com. There is scattered info on it through out the blog, so feel free to look through past months for a thorough understanding of the project.

The money will go directly to:

-paying the hair and makeup artists who have been doing a great job on the photo shoots

-getting the 8X10 negatives printed on large pieces of recycled paper (this needs to be experimented with to see what will be most successful. Right now I'm looking at digital printing and liquid emulsion.)

-Plexi-glass boxes for the presentation of the sculptures

-and frames for the recycled paper 8x10 prints

Right now I am taking pre-orders for loaves of bread. For those of you who were at Sharon's studio for her 1 yr anniversary, you tried the carrot/zucchini bread (it was yummy).

It is $5 per loaf and the chooses are:

carrot and zucchini
carrot
zucchini
and banana

At the bake sale I will also have

Milk Chocolate Fudge with almonds (Great-Gramma Watts' recipe updated)

A Dark Chocolate with Cinnamon and Cumin (Great-Gramma Watts' recipe updated)

Peanut butter cookies (Great-Gramma Watts' recipe)

Toll House Squares (Great-Gramma Watts' stolen from old Toll house ;))

Rice Crispie Treats

Brownies (Great-Gramma Watts' recipe from scratch!)

There will also be the above breads available per slice. and Ann Petit from Suede Studios will be making some Vegas chooses.

I'm sure I will come up with more by then, but this is what is on the list so far. Just send me an email if you want to pre-order anything.

I can also take pre-orders for batter if you want to get a whole batch of something. I have been experimenting with freezing batter and so far every thing I've tested has turned out great. I haven't tested the bread batters though, so I wouldn't recommend me freezing you some of that because I can't be sure it will come out "Watts quality" ;).

The Make Up Artist has mentioned making some key lime pie too, so that just might be in the line up too. ;)

send any bake sale requests to

nicky@nickywatts.com
or give me a call: 702-416-6558

Brittany Peltier's Interior Design Portfolio

What a relief!

So here's some background. Brittany Peltier is an interior design student at the International School of Interior Design here in the Vegas area. This girl is a hard worker. When she brought over her projects, she had piles of all really creative boards that you could tell she slaved over the details on. They're was three that werem't on board, they were on plexiglass, and a curtain designed into a board. Nothing was ordinary, and she knew exactly what she wanted to fix, change, develop, clean, and reconstruct.

Once editing started it was very clear that she expected top notch quality. Its nice to have a client who is willing to point out the awkward looking things that might of happened in editing, but also in their picture or art work. She piled on ideas for different ways she thought each photo would look its best.

Brittany and I have been using flickr to communicate needed changes in the editing, deciding what edits are more fitting, and picking and developing the layouts to use for the actual portfolio pieces. It was an asset last night while we both stayed up until 5am discussing changes in layouts.

Over all, we both did a great job. She was a doll to work with, and her work was really incredible. So here it is. Don't be fooled, this is prob about 70hrs worth of work between photographing the work, editing the photos and building the portfolio (not including the many many hours she put into it all).




Wow. Isn't this girl good? So if you need some interior design let me know and I'll pass along the info. She graduates this year.

Shoot #3 with Birttani Rael revised

Since the ball was rolling I figured I 'd let it roll:

When I orginally edited these photos I hated them. They looked so fake. I was very depressed about them. So I have reedited. They're still not the best in the series, but at least they don't look completely fake anymore.





Now I'm exhausted and am going to bed. Good night.

Wear Recycle shoot #4

So here they are, finally.

Much has happened since we shot these. I was out of town for 3 weeks (I was able to cast 10 casts while away) and I have had non stop editing for paying jobs every time my feet have been on the ground (this is very good).

Don't get me wrong, I have Brittany Peltier's portfolio to design and a few photos to make last minute adjustments on, but after about 5 days...or more now...of nonstop editing of interior decorating graphs, I thought it was appropiate to take a day off.

Today I focused on Wear Recycle. I rearranged my studio so that I can work on both sides of one of the work tables allowing me to have 8 casts set up to be built at once! This is great since I can only work on one at a time.

During 20 minute break increments the last few days, I have been jumping over to the building table to work on the casts. As of right now, one of them is finished, one of them might be but I need to leave it over night to dry before confirming that, another one is close but not there yet, and three more have had either the first or second layers added to them.

Today I worked my butt off editing these photos. They are not perfect, but they are where they are going to be for now. If anyone hasn't noticed yet, I am a person that likes to revise my photos. I'm like that with everything for the most part. The third shoot of Wear Recycle is in desperate need of a reedit. I did an awful job on Brittany's skin.

Well, here are the new ones.







Here's the team:

Photographer/Sculptor:
Nicky Watts
Model:
Malika Iskandarova
Pharoah Najm
Make Up Artist:
Samantha Henrikson
Hair Stylist:
Valarie Zwahlen
Assistant:
Ann Pettit

Hurray Hurray.. Moving forward one step at a time!

I also want to thank Ann Pettit of Suede Studios who was kind enough to help me make some paper a couple weeks ago. Yesterday, I brought the paper up from the garage where it was drying and it looks great. Its very thick and has spectacular texture.

I almost forgot to mention I was able to get tickets to Le Femme at the MGM for Saturday night. I was giving 4 of them..One for me, Rich, VAL, and SAM! Finally they get a little something for all there efforts. They are great and deserve every minute of it.

HAA and Wear Recycle

This will be short because I have a whole lot of work to do.....but....


I am the new vice president to the HAA! YEAH. We should be doing some fun stuff in the near future.


I have been working on Wear Recycle sculptures during breaks from editing (I can only usually work on one for no more than 20 minutes before its too fragile to continue) and I am just about finished with three. This is exciting because the development of Wear Recycle has been fast, but to actually show progress has not. YEAH again!

I can't move on with developing Brittany Peltier's portfolio until I get a return email, so I am going to work on some edits from our last shoot right now. Its about time.

Thanks for following.