Just a few other tips: Some people take pictures of their children periodically. You think they grow up fast now wait until you see them in time-lapse!

Protect your camera and setup
Don't forget to put up a perimeter worthy of the finest crime scene investigator to keep kids, overly helpful people from touching the camera, and animals from disturbing the camera.

As you can see in Figure A, a little action can help an otherwise dull time-lapse like packing a suitcase. The camera hog, a particularly wild beast, was just one "roll over" from knocking over the camera!

FIGURE A


This time-lapse example helped identify a potential stow-away. Roll over picture for a larger image.

The image shown above is a GIF file, which has been animated with the frames of my still images. In a future article, I'll show you how to make your own animated time-lapse GIF image.

David Gewirtz is the author of How To Save Jobs and Where Have All The Emails Gone? For more than 20 years, he has analyzed current, historical, and emerging issues relating to technology, competitiveness, and policy. David is the Editor-in-Chief of the ZATZ magazines, is the Cyberterrorism Advisor for the International Association for Counterterrorism and Security Professionals, and is a member of the instructional faculty at the University of California, Berkeley extension. He can be reached at david@zatz.com and you can follow him at http://www.twitter.com/DavidGewirtz.