Telling A Story With Your Eyes

Knoxville-based photographer Kristina Plaas got bitten by the photography bug at a young age, and she’s channeled that passion into a unique role at the nation’s most-visited national park. 

Officially a volunteer photographer for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park—and for the Blue Ridge Parkway—Plaas, 59, stays busy, last year donating about 250 hours and driving 6,000 miles to capture perfect shots throughout the Smokies. 

What was your entrance into the world of photography? What got you hooked? 

My mother was a wonderful photographer, just for travel and family, and so I got my first camera in middle school—one of those Kodak Instamatics, which I took with me everywhere. After I graduated from college, I got my first 35-millimeter SLR camera, and I fell in love with wildflowers in national parks. I went out and took pictures as a way to cope with stress from being a critical care nurse. And that’s what I had done for decades. And then after I got out of nursing for health reasons, I got a digital SLR camera and started back into the Smokies, a healing journey, taking pictures along the way.

How did you get involved with photography for the Smokies?

I started volunteer work in 2013 assisting visitors from the visitor center at Clingmans Dome. I still do that, though I spend more time with photography than at Clingmans Dome. It was while I was volunteering at Clingmans Dome that summer that the National Park Service was strongly encouraging parks to become actively engaged in social media, especially on Facebook. So the leaders in the Smokies decided they would get involved by doing fall color reports for visitors that were coming in October. To do that they needed current photos to tell the story, and the person charged with the task of creating the posts really didn’t have time to go out and take pictures herself. So they reached out to all of the park volunteers and asked if anybody would be interested in helping submit pictures. I was already taking pictures so I raised my hand and said, ‘I’ll do that.’ That was 2013, and 2014 my role as a volunteer photographer was formalized. I’ve been doing it ever since then.

Fall leaf season is a magnet for tourists and photographers in the Smokies, but this area happens to have four beautiful seasons. Which is your favorite to photograph? 

Spring is my favorite, without a doubt. I love April in the Smokies. Wildflowers is my addiction of choice. Every day things completely change. I love watching the leaves first bud out on the trees and that brilliant green that slowly expands and fills the forest canopy, and all the beautiful colors of the trillium and the lady’s slippers. It makes my heart skip beats. Then fall obviously comes after that, just because of the riot of color and watching the color change. In the spring I watch the green slowly creep up the slopes of the mountains and in the fall I watch the colors descend into this gorgeous tapestry.

You snap thousands of photos in a given year. What makes for a particularly special image?

It needs to be something that tells a story to those who just see the picture, whether that’s about a very unusual or distinctive flower, whether that’s about paying homage to the people who called the Smokies home prior to the national park, telling their stories by showing their cabins or their pathways or their rusted-out relics. It’s telling a story with your eyes.