We're Chris and Kara.
A husband and wife team based in Geelong. Chris shoots every job himself and decides how the work looks. Kara runs production, admin and the final check on every image, which is why nothing falls through the cracks and you hear back the same day. We've been photographing property across this region since 2015, and we're still learning something new from every house we shoot.
How we got here
Chris has been drawn to houses for as long as he's held a camera. His university exhibition in Hobart, back in 2001, was a series on suburban houses shot on 35mm black and white film, each print mounted in its own handmade box so you had to peer at it through a hole. He's been photographing buildings ever since. A Master of Fine Arts in photography, post-production work in Melbourne, then Amsterdam, where he helped set up and run a European studio for an Australian production agency. That's where he and Kara worked together first, him running post, her running production. Twenty countries with a camera later, they moved home to Geelong, where Kara was born.
Chris learned the trade from the inside first, shooting twilights for a media company in Richmond, then a year flat out as a real estate photographer. Then in 2015 he and Kara knocked on the door of every agency in Geelong and the Bellarine with homemade muffins and a price list, and started what would become Abode Productions.
Twelve years behind the camera and nearly nine thousand shoots later, the work has only got better. Not because the gear changed, but because shooting one region for that long teaches you things you can't learn any other way. A west-facing deck in Torquay at 4pm in winter. What weatherboard looks like when it's honest. How a new kitchen changes the way a room breathes. You don't learn that from a manual. You learn it one home at a time.
Kara runs production, and always has. Bookings, schedules, delivery, the back-end work that keeps everything moving. When you email Abode and get a response today instead of next week, that's her. But her real signature is on the images themselves. Kara is the last set of eyes on every job, in Photoshop fixing the things most people would never notice: a power cord, a smudge on a mirror, a bin left in shot. Nothing gets delivered until she's signed it off, and she's properly proud of that. And if anything needs changing once the files are with you, Kara is the one you talk to. No forms, no ticket number.
And then there's Zach, who's seven. As far as he's concerned Dad flies drones all day and is somehow also a YouTuber, because that's where the work ends up.
What we're actually good at
Anyone can learn to expose a room properly. The harder thing to teach is what happens in the twenty minutes before the camera comes out: getting a vendor who's a bit nervous about strangers in their home to relax, hearing what they actually love about the place, and letting them tell you its story instead of just handing over the keys and clearing out.
That matters because the vendor's experience becomes the agent's experience. A homeowner who felt looked after, not managed, talks about it, to their agent, to their neighbours, to whoever asks how the campaign went. We're only in someone's home for an hour or two, but the impression we leave outlasts us, and it reflects on the agent's name as much as ours. Making the agent look good is, honestly, most of the job.
We didn't always shoot everything ourselves. Early on we brought in other photographers to keep up with demand, and it never quite sat right: the consistency wasn't there, and Chris couldn't vouch for what happened in a house he hadn't stood in. So we changed how it works. Full creative control, start to finish, on every single job. That's the real reason the studio stays small, wanting to know exactly what happened in every home we shoot.
The finish gets the same care. The same small editing team has worked on our photos and video for years, so the look doesn't drift from job to job, and Kara signs off every single delivery herself. Consistency isn't a happy accident here. It's the whole system.
The paperwork
Fully licensed and insured. Working with us means we're covered for any site, any condition, any accident.
CASA certified drone pilot. Certified and insured for commercial aerial photography and video across the region.
Australian White Card. We're cleared to work on construction sites, and we know the safety protocols inside out.
Working with Children Check. Because some of our shoots involve family homes with kids present, and trust matters.
We work with real estate agents, builders, architects and commercial clients across Geelong, the Bellarine, the Surf Coast and the Golden Plains. If your property or project needs to be seen at its best, that's what we do. The same two people, every time. The same standard, every job.
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