Location, product and composite photography for Gale Pacific Coolaroo

Endorsed by Cancer Council Australia, Coolaroo's shade sails block up to 95% of UV rays. The range comes in a variety of shapes, sizes and colours to suit most yards, backed by a 15-year warranty.

We worked with Coolaroo for approximately five years, led by Lisa Saad, Principal Photographer at Gotham Studios Melbourne, photographing across numerous locations and a wide range of installed and in-situ applications.

The brief

Deliver campaign imagery across the Coolaroo range, showing the products in real-world residential and commercial applications — suitable for marketing, advertising, retail and ecommerce.

Applications went well beyond a shade sail over a backyard. We photographed existing residential and commercial installations, as well as shade cloth installed specifically for the shoot — garage side screening, fences, and other outdoor shade solutions.

The challenge — you can't control the sun, and you can't build every scenario

This is a product whose entire function is managing sunlight. That means you can't shoot it in flat, safe, overcast conditions — you need visible sun to show shade doing its job. But hard sun creates harsh contrast between the shaded area and the bright surrounds, which is exactly the range a camera struggles with.

The bigger commercial problem is coverage. Coolaroo's range spans multiple product types, colours and applications, and the campaigns needed to show them in a wide variety of settings. Physically installing and photographing every product in every relevant environment isn't practical — the cost and time would be enormous, and some settings simply aren't available to shoot in.

How we solved it — two approaches running in parallel

Location photography. We started with location recces, scouting settings and tracking how the sun moved across each one so we knew which hours would work for which shot. Weather and light were always the governing factor, so scheduling and shoot planning were built around suitable conditions rather than fixed dates. On the day, we balanced exposure so the shaded area reads as cool and inviting while the surrounding sunlight still looks like real Australian sun.

Composite work — the part that made the campaigns scalable. We also photographed the shade cloth products separately in controlled conditions, then retouched them into suitable images drawn from Coolaroo's image library and Lisa's own existing library. This let us show products in realistic applications that would have been impractical or impossible to build and photograph on location.

Getting this right is entirely dependent on the source photography. The lighting direction, perspective, shadow behaviour and colour temperature of the product shot have to match the destination image exactly, or the composite reads as fake immediately. Because Lisa shot both sides of the equation, we controlled the match rather than hoping for it.

Finally, image selection and retouching to ensure fabric colour, weave texture and tension were represented accurately across the range.

The result

A broad campaign library spanning installed lifestyle imagery, standard product photography, close-up detail showing fabric texture and construction, and retouched composite campaign images — covering far more product and application combinations than a location-only approach could have delivered.

Why this matters for your brand

Outdoor and seasonal products are the highest-risk shoots there are, because the weather can delete a shoot day. The protection is planning: recce, sun-track, storyboard, and keep the schedule flexible.

But the bigger lesson is about scale. If your product needs to be shown in many different settings, you don't have to build all of them. A well-planned combination of location photography and carefully matched composite work gives you far more coverage for the budget — provided the product photography and the retouching are handled by the same team. Composites fail when the person shooting the product has never seen the scene it's going into.

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Credits

This photography for Coolaroo was produced and art-directed by Lisa Saad, Principal Photographer at Gotham Studios Melbourne. Our team coordinated all logistics, art direction, styling and post-production, and produced the work as requested by the client. Gotham Studios Melbourne. We are your photographers. www.lisasaad.com · www.coolaroo.com