Eielson Associate’s Snowy Express Photo Illustrates Heat of Social Media

On a cold morning in early January, Krista Kelley, a warehouse worker foreman at the Eielson Air Force Base Exchange in Alaska, took a photo of the snow-covered Express canopy.

“Cold” is an understatement: It was 47 degrees below zero.

This photo of an Express at Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska—taken by warehouse worker foreman Krista Kelley when it was 47 degrees below zero—is the most popular photo ever on @shopmyexchange Instagram.

Kelley sent the photo to the Exchange’s social media team, which shared the photo on the Exchange Facebook page as well as the @shopmyexchange Instagram feed. The response was huge: On Instagram, it was the Exchange’s most-liked post ever. On Exchange Facebook, it was one of the most popular posts, with more than 3,300 reactions and hundreds of comments, more than 2,200 shares.

“I’m blown away by that,” Kelley said. “It really has caught me off-guard, how many likes and shares and comments on all platforms of social media that photo has generated.”

Since 2016, Kelley has contributed more than a dozen photos to Exchange social media, which she believes is important in capturing the life of working for the Exchange.

“That photo shows the challenge,” she said of the Express picture. “It’s a challenge because I’m outside at negative 50, but we work as a team and you have to get things done, and at the end of the day, the Airmen are outside, too. So we give them a welcoming, warm place to come in and hang out and have a little bit of conversation.”

“Purple Bee,” one of the photos from Krista Kelley’s Arctic Rose studio.

Kelley’s love of photography is rooted in her childhood, when she worked with her father in his darkroom. She bonded with him while standing shoulder to shoulder, watching the pictures show up through the chemicals. That ignited her passion for photography.

As an adult, though, she put the camera down for several years. “Then I took a random photo of a big purple bumblebee, and people fell in love with it,” she said. “I felt encouraged to start my business back up. The Express photo made it more clear that’s the route I need to be taking again.”

Her photos tend less toward snow-covered Expresses than they do toward brightly colored close-ups of flowers and bees and other insects. “I do a lot of spring and summer macro photography,” she said. “I focus on the small things in life that people normally miss. Everybody looks up and see the beauty around them. I wanted to be the person who looks down and sees the small stuff.” (You can view more of her photos on Instagram or on her Arctic Rose Studio website.)

This is the second time in Alaska for Kelley, who is originally from New Orleans and grew up in Arizona.

“I had always wanted to go to Alaska,” she said. “A friend of mine was moving back to Anchorage and was driving from Baltimore, so I tagged along. I ended up getting a job and staying.” She met her husband, an Air Force technical sergeant at the time, when he was stationed at nearby Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson; they relocated to Dyess Air Force Base in West Texas before returning to Alaska and Eielson, where they live with their four rescue dogs (her husband retired a month ago after 20 years of service). It was at Eielson that she joined the Exchange, eight years ago.

Krista Kelley with Fred, one of her four rescue dogs.

“We were still in temporary lodging and I thought, ‘Well, it’s right here and they’re hiring,’’’ she said. “I moved up in the ranks at the store, and I decided to stick around. I really enjoy being around the customers. I love that our store has a view of the flight line and I can watch the jets fly.”

And although her official title is warehouse foreman, she doesn’t spend all her time at Eielson in the warehouse.

“I’m in a store that’s a combined main store and an Express,” she said. “I’ll be on the Express side a lot in the morning, making food, then I go do my job, which puts me in the warehouse. I have regular customers who come in in the morning and we joke around. I even have a couple who say, ‘I only buy coffee if I see you standing there, because you make the good coffee.” It’s things like that that make you want to come to work.”

Have a photo of your Exchange you’d like to share, no matter the weather? Send it to socialmedia@aafes.com