paul rigby volvo, stourbridge
Architecture, interiors and Automotive photography for a major car retailer
Client - Paul Rigby Volvo, Stourbridge
Location - Grange Lane, Stourbridge, West Midlands
Sector - Commercial, Automotive Retailer
Original brief - Unspecific, Promotional Photoshoot
Delivered - Interiors, exterior and street scene, Automotive
The brief
I approached Paul Rigby Volvo to attend their showroom in Stourbridge and photograph their premises and product range. A simple commission: photograph the premises and provide clean, crisp visuals for online use.
Treating a dealership as a building
Franchise dealerships rarely get photographed as architecture. They get photographed as a backdrop: wide, cheap, tilted, with the cars in focus and the building falling away behind them.
It’s an oft-missed opportunity, because a modern dealership is a designed building working to a tight corporate specification. The Volvo Retail Experience format is visible in every element here — the clean white rendered volume with its deep parapet, the thin blue branding fascia signage, the freestanding totem sign, and the continuous glazed showroom elevation that runs the full length of the frontage. It's a considered piece of retail architecture, and the site had been finished and maintained to a standard that deserved to be recorded properly.
The approach
True elevation. The main frontage was shot square-on from across the street with verticals kept strictly parallel, giving something close to an orthographic elevation rather than a wide-angle snapshot. With the topography as it was, the building itself was set within a recess. Also, with such a horizontally prominent building, any convergence in the render panels or the glazing mullions is clear and obvious — holding them true and parallel is what separated this as an architectural frame from a forecourt photo.
Controlling the glazing. The showroom façade is almost entirely glass, which on most days reads as a mirror. Camera position relative to the building level and time of day were chosen so the glazing stays transparent, letting the showroom interior and the inside operations read through the elevation rather than bouncing sky back to the lens.
White render against sky. A large white volume under a bright sky is a broad dynamic range problem, shooting with Sony’s Alpha 7 camera range (Mark IV) meant I was able to capitalise on it’s high dynamic range ability to even out the exposure. Frame exposure was set to hold detail and maintain subtle tone variation in the render while keeping the sky and cloud structure intact — no blown white box, no flat grey façade.
Stock as composition, not clutter. The forecourt line-up was used deliberately: the row of vehicles anchors the base of the building, gives scale to the frontage, and adds colour against an otherwise white and blue palette. The articulation of the vehicles also provides a subtle leading line, framing the building within it’s recessed plot. Overall composition includes the kerb and road to place the site in its broader context.
The outcome
Paul Rigby received a complete visual asset library for their Google listing, eBay page and other promotional pages. Exterior architectural imagery also supports the Google listing as a way finding visual.
Why this shoot went further
I've spent over a decade working within the architectural industry, currently as a BIM and Digital specialist at Chetwoods Associates.That background changes what I look for on site: elevation logic, glazing lines, parapet detail, how a corporate format sits on its particular plot.
The result is imagery that works for the dealership's marketing and stands up as a proper record of the building.
