By Mark McConville
PERFECT for all pizza-loving mums, this photographer documented her baby’s first year of life with pizza slices representing his age in months.
The adorable pictures show little Lorenzo lying on one side of an open pizza box with pizza slices on the other side. As Lorenzo grows in size the pizza slices also grow in number until they form a full pizza when Lorenzo turned one.
Other cute images show Lorenzo enjoying a huge birthday cake and posing with mum Danielle Leigh, dad Frank and older brother Charlie (3).
Photographer Danielle Leigh Giannandrea (34), from Frederick, Maryland, USA, came up with the idea to do a monthly milestone photo project and wanted to link it to something Italian.
“I knew I wanted to do a monthly milestone photo project for my second son,” she said,
“I sort of abandoned the project with my older son that we had started – it was him in a vintage suitcase, we used to travel all the time, so the travel theme came naturally – and I had some mom guilt over not following through.
“When brainstorming with my mom, Lorenzo’s Granny, she said that I really should do something Italian as an ode to his name. I had tossed around a few ideas but ultimately decided if we were going to do this right, we may as well also get dinner out of it each month, so pizza was what we decided on.
“What you see in these images is a monthly progression of my son Lorenzo from one month old (still a squishy, little newborn) to 12 months (a nearly 20lb baby who wants to be done with this photo project so badly).
“He is laying on one side of an open pizza box with slices of pizza next to him based on his age in months he was at the time. One slice for one month, two slices for two months, and so on from there.”
Danielle, who runs Dani Leigh Photography, explained how she managed to take these heart-warming photographs and the problems she ran into.
“We did all of these photos in my kitchen, we would lay out a few yards of white seamless paper after picking up our pizza from our local pizza place, and basically mutilating it with a steak knife because no one cuts a pizza into 12 slices and our pizza cutter is terrible and could hardly ever get the job done,” she said.
“We would place the pizza box on the floor – we actually got a new pizza box from the pizza place every three months. I’m sure they thought we were crazy, but they obliged. We would then put Lorenzo on top of the left side of the open pizza box while I climbed to the top of my step ladder and my husband and younger son jumped around and acted super goofy to get him to smile or stay away from the pizza.
“There were definitely some problems to overcome during the shoot. Mainly, that the older he got, the harder it was to keep him in one spot. These shoots all took less than three minutes of actual shooting time because that is the attention span of a kid next to pizza.
“We also have lighting issues – we had a rule that it had to be within a few days of the 10th – either before or after and since we were doing these all in natural light, we had to find the best day for it. Sometimes we had cloudy days endlessly and I thought those photos would be doomed and not look cohesive when I put them all together.”
