Seeing Soul Through the Lens
Cloudcroft photographer and business owner Crystal Tompkins finds home—and helps others find themselves—one portrait at a time
Crystal Tompkins was the kid who spent hours on the floor with family photo albums, studying every face. She’d sit with her father, flipping through his high school yearbooks from the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.
“We would kind of be like, who’s the coolest on this page?” she remembers. “I was fascinated by just looking at these people and thinking about their story and who they were as a person and just their choices—how they wore their hair and all the things.”
That fascination never left.
Today, Tompkins runs a portrait photography business from her studio on Little Glorietta, where natural light streams through windows onto simple backdrops. This month, she’s expanding into a larger space next door as her business grows.
“I really will take as long as it needs to get a photo that I feel like they will love,” Tompkins explains. “If we get it in the first 20 minutes, cool. If it takes three hours, that’s what we’ll do.”
From Yearbooks to Backdrops
By age 10, maybe younger, Tompkins was staging photo shoots in her bedroom with her brothers as reluctant models. “My room was never clean, but I would clean it for a photo shoot,” she laughs.
When she got her first DSLR camera after her oldest son Triston was born, everything clicked. “I didn’t stop. I was just so hooked.”
The Tompkins family moved to Cloudcroft when Triston was five, just five days before school started—the culmination of years spent visiting the mountain village from their home in Texas. Crystal’s husband Nathan had grown up making weekend trips here from Andrews.
One day, Crystal and Nathan found themselves heading home from grocery shopping in Midland when all three kids fell asleep at once.
“We turned to each other, like we hadn’t seen each other in a few months. And we were just like, you want to go to Cloudcroft? It was kind of like that.”
She called the school when she got home. Classes started in five days. They moved.
“This, for some reason, always felt like home. And I hadn’t really ever been to a place that felt like home,” she reflects. They got Zia tattoos. “It just feels like home.”
Capturing Essence, Not Perfection
In her studio, Tompkins photographs everyone from babies to seniors—or she’ll come to their homes.
Her photography philosophy is clear: “I have always been most drawn to capturing the essence of the souls in front of my camera.” She believes photographs are the closest thing to time-traveling. “The way you can hear a person’s laugh, smell their perfume, or feel their hug just by looking at a photo is magic.”
The sessions vary wildly. She’s photographed people who could teach her about posing and others who shut down when the camera appears. “It really is very much an intuitive, people-reading process.”
She recalls photographing Tom Taylor, whose portraits hung in Black Bear Coffee—the shop she and Nathan opened on Burro Avenue—at the time of his passing.
Before taking his photos, they talked for an hour and a half at the roastery side first. The coffee shop dream began on a first date in a café, where Crystal and Nathan talked about someday opening one together. They made it happen seventeen years and three kids later, roasting their own beans in Cloudcroft in the space Crystal’s studio now shares with the roastery.
Before taking Tom’s photos, they talked for an hour and a half at the roastery side first. She watched his mannerisms and noticed what he sat on. When they finally moved to the backdrop, she took just 35 photos.
“I just wanted to capture him. He got comfortable before we even got in front of the backdrop, and then we just kept talking.”
The impact surprises even her. “I’ve heard some people tell me that a session has changed their whole life.”
The Hard Part
Not everyone loves what Tompkins sees through her lens—at first.
“It’s probably one of the hardest parts of my job when a person, and I’ve learned how to hold space for it—when they don’t see what I see,” she admits. Sometimes she’ll sneak in a picture or two in their album that they didn’t choose “because if I’m that in love with it, I just can’t let it die on my computer.”
She’s noticed a generational shift. “My older clients tend to feel pressure to look perfect in photos. I’m noticing the shift in attitude toward photos and body image in general with the younger crowd. They seem to embrace the imperfections and the older crowd tends to want to fix them or not see them at all. I hope we can all learn from the younger crowd and see that life is happening in the imperfect and messy.”
“It’s not 100 percent across the board, but I’m seeing more room for authenticity over perfection as a general trend. I want to be a part of that movement—as a recovering perfectionist.”
Soul Sessions and New Beginnings
Tompkins’ newest offering, the Soul Session, is a black-and-white portrait experience designed to be accessible and authentic.
“Come as you are, don’t buy anything new, don’t do anything different. Come in the way you show up in your everyday life,” she explains. She even shoots with her camera set to black and white mode, and clients see their images in black and white first during a zoom reveal.
“If I could just photograph faces with black and white film forever, I would be 100% okay with that,” she admits.
There’s a Technicolor add-on available—a playful rebellion against the typical color-to-black-and-white conversion.
Her main goal with POW (Portraits of Women—a name chosen because it’s part of the word “power”) and her other portrait work remains constant: “I want people to show up for themselves more. I feel like I can get a good photo of everybody if you just walk in my door.”
“I want more people to fall in love with themselves or at least be content with themselves, a friend to themselves,” she says. “In having a photo session, at least the way I do it—that is my goal at the end of the day.”
The new studio space reflects both her photography business’s growth and the expansion of Nathan’s coffee roasting operation, which shares the current space divided only by a curtain. She’s offering special photo packages to celebrate the move.
Village Life
“Nathan and I are at our best when we’re creating together—making babies, making businesses. That is just where we shine,” she says.
Now, with a high school junior approaching graduation and all three kids—Triston, Harper, and Adelyn—rooted in the community, the village life they chose feels right.
“They all learned to read from Mrs. Lee. My kids have been able to learn what it’s like to be part of a community and be part of something bigger than your family unit,” Tompkins says. “Having teenagers in a village is really nice because it’s not just me and Nathan’s eyes that are on them.”
On her wrist, she wears a reminder tattooed in permanent ink: “Be Here Now.”
In Tompkins’ studio, amid simple backdrops and natural light, people discover what she’s seen all along—the beauty that was always there, waiting to be witnessed.
Portrait sessions start at $350 and include five images. For booking information and current offerings, visit crystaltompkins.com. Black Bear Coffee is online at mybbcoffee.com.
This article originally appeared in the January 2026 Mountain Monthly.
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