When one of the little boys Crystal was shooting replied to Santa after being asked what he wanted for Christmas, he replied… “a Nintendo DS and my family”. Crystal’s heart nearly broke in half.

Over 2500 children and their families attended the event and included sponsors like St. Louis Rams, St. Louis Bar Foundation, and St. Louis Bar Association,  Catholic Charities, Foster and Adoptive Care Coalition, First Book, Grace Hill-PATCH, and Midwest Litigation Services.

There was so much for the kids to do including  a book corner, and inflatable rock climbing wall, St. Louis Rams cheerleaders, music, and even getting to play catch on the field with some of the Rams players and awesome presents!

After we finished shooting all the kids, we packed up all the gear, we took a stroll around the football field before heading out. All I can say is WOW! The field looks a LOT smaller on TV!

We can’t wait to do it again next year.

After you take the quiz, copy the results from the page exactly as they are on the screen, and email them (along with you name and contact information) to blogcontest@colortouchphotography.com, and you will be entered to win your choice of a free engagement session, or $100 of photo credit!

The person with the highest score wins! In the event of a tie, the winner will be randomly drawn from the “tie-ees”.

Good luck!

PS – Be sure to pass this on to anyone who might want to get in on it!

Your entry must be received by 11:59pm on November 30th. Entries received after that will be void. You should receive a confirmation email saying that your email has made it to us. Certain restrictions apply. Call Crystal at 314.303.3618 for more information.

Ok, I know that we usually don’t post stuff like this, but I wanted to put together a quick little review about our new phones from Blackberry, the Storm. Crystal and I gave each other early Christmas presents in the form of the Blackberry Storm. If you know any of the hype behind this phone, then you know folks are touting this as an IPhone killer. I’ll tell you up front that it really is… and really is not.

I won’t go into detail with the phone specs and everything. If your interested in the phone, then you already know the specs or can easily google them. Listed below are quick like, dislikes, and overall impressions.

Likes:

Screen – Big and beautiful. A tiny-bit smaller than IPhone, but higher pixel density. Crisp and clear.
Email – Like every BB, email and messaging is exquisite!
Web speed – 3g rocks, and I hate to admit that Verizon’s network is fast and well-covered.
Web browsing – Really nice. Real HTML. Navigating can be a little funky until you get used the interface quirks (more on that later)
Phone – Sound is on par with my old BB Curve. Very nice.
Speaker – Considering the speaker is tiny, it’s very good. Speakerphone is clear.
Memory – It comes with an 8gig microSD card and you don’t have to pull the battery to get to it if you want to change it out.
Touch Screen - Takes a bit to get used to is you come from using an IPod Touch or IPhone. It works great and the tactile feedback of the “click is very nice”. Just be warned that this may be an aquired taste and take a day or two to fully get used to.
UI – Classic Blackberry with a twist. Very nice except with the problems listed below.
Keyboard – In landscape mode, it works great.
Oh yeah… Cut/Paste!!! – I am stoked about something so minuscule. IPhone REALLY needs this.

Dislikes:

UI - They needed to bake the user interface a bit longer. It has a potential to be very nice, but there are noticeable lag at times that can be frustrating. BB should address this and other probs in future updates (I really hope!).
Keyboard – I love the full QWERTY keyboard in landscape, but in portrait mode, they went with the same setup as the Pearl with 2 letters per number. Works good for basic typing, but for words not in it’s library, it’s a pain for me. Hopefully they add full qwerty to portrait mode in updates.
Applications – Most of my old BB apps I have downloaded don’t work, or don’t work properly because of the new screen size and interface. I’m not overly worried about it though, I can see that there will be a ton more apps eventually that wouldn’t have been written for BB until the Storm came a long.
Lack of Flash support – This may sound familiar to IPhone owners. It doesn’t support Flash yet. This gets my goat. I guess that BB and Apple never got the memo, but Flash is mainstream now. It’s not some obscure plugin it was 10 years ago. I pray to the mobile phone gods that they correct this glaring mistake omission better than later!

Overall:

I give it a basic thumbs up. I don’t think it will be an IPhone killer, but it will do very well and be a viable alternative to those who don’t want to be with AT&T. You can’t beat Blackberrys’ email services. Rock-on! My only real gripe is with Blackberry for releasing the Storm before it was really ready. At times, I feel like I’m using an Alpha development device and not even a beta version. The UI CAN be wonderful, but with lags, glitches, and long hangs, it needs to be put back in the oven for a bit longer to bake.

Don’t get me wrong. The phone is nice and it works pretty good. It can just be a little annoying sometimes. Both Crystal and I like it and will hopefully completely love it when they address some of it’s quirks with updates.

The new year is shaping up nicely for us. We are booking up fast for 2008 and even have a couple bookings for 2009 already. We are very excited. We are also be going to make some changes here at Colortouch Photography.

We hope to evolve the Colortouch Website some more, but more importantly, we are going to buckle down and get our blogging up to where it needs to be. We were so busy this summer, that our blog really suffered. We plan to pick up the pace a bit and put out more quantity and quality posts.

We also want to encourage participating our blogs. Go ahead and leave comments. Let us know what you think. Give us suggestions. Heck, even just say hi! We would LOVE to hear from you!

We also have some very exciting plans for 2008. We can’t spill the beans yet, but once we get everything worked out, we’ll have some great news to tell you all about some unique, value-added services we’ll be providing to our brides. We can’t wait to tell you about them! (but I guess we’ll have to for now!)

We hope your 2008 is everything you hope it is and we can’t wait to hear from you!

Love, Dan and Crystal (and the mutts too!)

We will try to update it every chance we get. When something new happens in our lives, or with CTP (Colortouch Photography), we will keep you informed. We will also post a couple photos from our shoots as teasers. You are welcome to comment and interact all you want.

Please keep in mind that we are family oriented and will not allow vulgar, inappropriate, or any post we feel isn’t in the best interest of our viewers.

Ok. Enough jabbering… Here’s a couple of shots from our last engagement shoot. Joyce and Steve were a blast. We shot them in the St. Louis City Museum and it turned out to be a lot of fun. They were up for just about anything and we had a nice relaxing, loose session. Enjoy!

Dan

Talk to you all later!

Dan