Architectural Photography for Insol, Hawke's Bay

Insol is a facade design and manufacturing company. They specialise in custom architectural facades: louvres, mesh, canopies, dapple panels, grating and timber screening, working with leading architects across New Zealand and further afield, with offices in Invercargill, Auckland, New York and Sydney. They also run WindLab, their own wind tunnel testing facility, used to test facade elements for structural integrity and wind noise.

I've worked with Insol since 2023 through Atticus Road, their marketing agency. Neil Kilby at Atticus Road gets in touch once a project is complete, usually with a set of architect's plans and elevations to work from. I arrange access to each site myself. Being local makes this straightforward, I know the areas and usually the people I need to speak to, and where I don't have a direct contact, I generally know someone who does. Insol need photography of their facade work in context, images that show how the louvres, canopies and screens sit on the finished building, to support their case studies and social media.

Approach

Working from Neil's plans and elevations, I plan each shoot around the facade detail Insol need captured. I do a desktop study using Photopills beforehand to work out the best time of day to shoot. Understanding exactly where the sun will be at any given time, and how that light will interact with the building's facade, is important for getting the louvres, panels or screens to read properly in the finished images, so I plan around it rather than working it out on the fly. Shoots typically run two to four hours, depending on the project scope. I pride myself on a quick turnaround on these projects, since commercial clients need access to imagery as soon as possible for their own marketing.

Since 2023 I've photographed seven Insol projects across Hawke's Bay and into Napier: the louvred water tanks and dapple panelled Discovery Centre at Waiaroha in Hastings, Quest accommodation in Hastings, the Napier War Memorial Conference Centre, TW Property's building in Napier, the Bayleys building on Havelock Road in Havelock North, Farmlands’ new retail centre in Hastings, and most recently Taradale Police Station.

Each site calls for something different. Water infrastructure, hospitality, retail, civic and now emergency services buildings all sit differently in daylight, and the facade detail Insol need changes with the product involved, whether that's louvres, dapple panels or a canopy. I deliver both high resolution and web resolution files from every shoot, with the number of images varying depending on the scale of the project.

Outcome

Photography from all seven projects is used as case studies on Insol's website, and shared across their Instagram and LinkedIn accounts.

Insol has now commissioned photography from me on seven projects since 2023, with Taradale Police Station the most recent addition in June 2026. More than 100 images have been supplied across these projects to date. Feedback via Neil at Atticus Road has been consistently positive, and it's a relationship I'm glad to keep building on as new Insol sites around the region are completed.