With Facebook’s recent profile revamp also comes the capability to do much more with photos. The social networking site recently gave users the ability to upload high-resolution images, customize the area at the top of their profile, and expanded the number of photos in album to 200.

A recent article on Digital Photography School outlined the many ways these new capabilities can be helpful to professional photographers. Here’s just a few of the tips listed:

Increase your presence – Set up a business page to highlight your professional services. This lets your friends, family, and customers “like” your page, and allows you to interact with them to discuss pricing information, order details, and more.

Optimize your page – Photography websites are an excellent way to display your work, but unfortunately aren’t always search engine friendly. Use Facebook albums to add a caption to photos. Or, if you’re familiar with HTML, use FBML to create custom tabs for your portfolio.

Customize your page – There are many free apps available through Facebook that can help brand your page. Add notes, articles about photography, and hundreds of images to your photo albums.

Drive engagement – Encourage user interaction on your page using things like open-ended questions, interesting articles, and plenty of samples. The key is getting people to participate – post things they’re interested in, and you’re much more likely to get comments and “likes” from your readers.

For even more information about how to make the most of your photography Facebook page, take a look at What Every Photographer Needs to Know About Facebook.

Quite a rare capture of Ollie, as he is usually found hanging around twitter logos, peeking from behind blogs, or just perched somewhere conspicuous.

Share this rare capture with a friend!

Here is a shot of a swimming pool at the Las Brisas apartment community.

I was out shooting an apartment community in the evening, and the light was dropping fast. I saw this heavily textured palm tree and thought that an element like that would really add the the environment if placed large in the frame. The only problem with my composition, is that the trunk of the tree was in complete shade, and zero texture was being revealed.

So I run to my car (which is around the corner to the left in the back of the image) to grab a flash and my wireless trigger, plus one full color temperature orange (CTO) warming gel. I run back to my tripod and camera and get my ambient where I want it (which happens to be as bright as you can get the scene without blowing out the sky, so you can pull in the shaded areas with more quality later in post). I then pop a few test shots holding the flash in my hand, and letting the hard light from the flash rake across the fibers of the tree. Once I got a shot I’m happy with, I’m done.

The set-up:

Me hand-holding a flash camera left pointing it directly at the palm tree with a full CTO gel, full power

Camera Settings:

Canon EOS 5D
ISO:50
Shutter: 1/25
f/8
Sigma 12-24mm f/4.5-5.6 EX