There's talk that it was the difficult economic times in Michigan that were to blame for the dropping number in orders.  But I also heard Traverse City had a near record year in Singing Valentine orders. 

We did try something new with photos.  Instead of using Polaroid instant cameras and giving the photo to the Valentine there, we took digital photos and uploaded them to our website which was noted on each Valentine card.  With quartets using their own personal digital camera it was hoped this would guarantee available cameras and remove any film issues.  A bonus was that this would generate traffic to the chorus website as well.  Since I was unable to get in a pickup quartet I instead followed one of our quartets for the day and took lots of photos.  The ones I took I had uploaded the next day.  Two of the other quartets emailed me theirs a few days later.  The last quartet instead used a disposable camera, had a lab develop including a disk they gave to me about a week after Valentine's Day.  Overall it went fairly well and we hope to streamline the process in future years.