I thought this was just the coolest idea
 

Found this linked on Fark this evening:
http://zonezero.com/magazine/essays/diegotime/time.html

Such a simple idea yet amazing at the same time. How I wish I would have done this back in '84. Sort of the photographic equal to marking the kid's height in the door jams. Now it seems that with two of mine grown and the third almost there the time has passed for something like this.

Anyone here done something like this? Anyone with new families thinking now about doing something like this? I'll be hasseling the boys now when they get married every year.

Yeah that is pretty cool. I think I will do that too.

Very cool indeed, that would be fun to put into a gif and animate it.

THAT is simply awesome. What amazes me is that the photographer had such a vision and discipline to do this... having each pose be exactly the same each year, with the same expression (with a little variation on the kids' smiles, but that's tough to control!). :) I would love to do this with my own family, once I am married. For now, I stick with highly informal and unposed pictures at random times... :lol:

I think it's funny to see how the woman's style changed from year to year yet the father kept the same haircut and beard the whole time.

This is a neat idea. It's something I would have liked to do.

Very cool.
I should probably do something like this at some point in my life, but I probably won't, because I hate taking pictures.
Still a really cool idea though.

Cool idea. I've thought about taking pictures even more frequently than once a year. That way you could put together a time lapse animation that keeps growing as time goes on. If you take pictures more frequently, you can put the animation together sooner. I'd imagine it would be hard to keep up the frequency as the kids get older though.

I still have a long time before I have kids of my own though.

That's a really good idea - I hope I remember this when I have kids. My family has family portrait-like pictures from every year, but it's not quite the same as "having each pose be exactly the same each year" as abaya said.

-Tamerlain

My boyfriend's family has something similar, though a bit less scientific-looking. In the hallway of their house they have one big picture frame with 18 pictures of my SO's brother, one big picture frame with 18 family photos, and one big picture frame with 18 pictures of my SO. They're all either professional portraits or school photos.

Even in that setting, it's very easy to see the progression.

if someone had a few minutes it wouldnt be hard to make those into an animated gif...

i might mess with it... but i'm not familiar with the software in linux...

all the picture rows are one picture all the same size, except for the first which is taller, just put one up after another...

That's pretty cool. My family has a similar progression thing of me and my brother, when we were younger and actually lived with the parents. That's kinda sad actually, I don't think we've had a family photo taken for several years now.

wow... beards grow in quick

I think that I'm going to try to convince my wife to do something like this. She's the keeper of the calendar, so she should be able to figure out when to do it.

That's a really cool idea, and well executed. Thanks for the link.

Imagine if the kids kept it up when they start their own families...that would be cool.

I dumped it into flash and animated it, It's not really pretty, clothes change, head placement is off etc. It's just as easy to save the images and open them with window XP's preview window thing and scroll through them quickly :) If you really must see it animated PM me and I'll send ya a link to it (It's 300k and I don't want the bandwidth killed or my account flagged)

oh yeah.. Forgot to say how cool the idea is :) there I said it.

It's an interesting idea. I'll have to remember it if I ever decide to spawn.