Architectural Photography in Hawke's Bay: The Taradale Police Station
Some buildings ask to be photographed differently to others. The new Taradale Police Station is one of them. I photographed the completed facade for Insol, the company behind the Solaris louvre and aluminium panel system used on the building. There was no formal brief, just a set of design plans and elevations, so the planning fell to me.
I used PhotoPills to work out the sun's position from sunrise and planned the shoot around it, then spent a two hour window that morning chasing the light as it moved across the facade. That kind of planning matters on a job like this. Get the sun angle wrong and the louvres go flat. Get it right and the whole facade comes alive.
The $7.2 million Police Station was built in an unconventional way. Nineteen sections were constructed in Wellington and transported to Hawke's Bay for assembly, a process that led some to describe the result as a "giant lego set." Stand in front of the finished building and you would never guess it. That is exactly why good architectural photography matters here. The construction story is interesting, but it is not what most people will notice first. What they will notice is the facade.
A facade designed to hold attention
The exterior combines Solaris louvres with aluminium feature panels, arranged in a pattern that shifts as you move past the building. Low morning sun catches the louvres at an angle and turns a functional civic building into something with real visual presence. That interplay of light, shadow, and material is precisely what a photograph needs to capture, and precisely what gets lost in a quick phone snap taken from a car window.
For a supplier like Insol, that distinction has commercial weight. A facade system is only as good as the evidence you can show a future client. Photography that flattens the depth of the louvres or misses the way the panels catch the light does not represent the product fairly, no matter how well it was installed.
Shooting for the design, not just the building
The set includes full daylight shots that place the building in its Taradale street context, alongside a shot taken as the low sunrise light hit the louvres side on. Seeing both together shows how much the facade changes depending on the time of day and the angle of the light, which is exactly the kind of variation a supplier or design team needs on hand.
This is the same approach I bring to any commercial or architectural brief, whether it is a new build, a fit-out, or a facade retrofit. The building has already done the hard work. My job is to photograph it in a way that holds up whether it is used in a tender document, a design awards entry, or a supplier's own marketing.
