Christoph Lossin

Aperture Alley & YoloAthlete Sports Photography

My interest in photography began when I was eight years old. During summers with my grandparents, I spent hours thumbing through past "GEO" issues (the German equivalent to National Geographic), wondering about the foreign lands and cultures I saw in the magazine's pictures. There were a lot of camera ads - Minolta, Nikon, Olympus - announcing the latest technical advances in photography... it felt like I only had to buy a camera to be able to go where all those pictures came from. Naive as I was, I was determined to get a Minolta 7000, the first camera with autofocus. I still remember how the salesperson in our local photography store looked at me with an expression of "Really?" on the face. After all, that camera was a serious piece of equipment. He, instead, recommended a manual camera that would teach me manual photography. Good advice, I think. I ended up with an Exacta HS-1, which topped out at 1/1000, fully manual, no-frills, along with shutter vibrations that, for sure, needed to be considered in the exposure. Equipped with Kodak Gold 100 film, I soon began looking at the world as if I were a light meter, predicting exposures for any one scene. Years and cameras went by. One camera that still stands out is my trusty Ricoh XR-P, and later, a Minolta Dynax 7000i (finally with that autofocus and integrated winder...). I was already 17 then and spent all my money on that camera, taking pictures of landscapes (in particular trees) and wildlife. People photography, of course, was also in the mix, but it was not until I took a short hiatus from photography that I recognized my passion for the human face. I attended a wedding, and there was a call for a jump-in photographer, a responsibility I gladly accepted. It felt like meeting an old friend. Since then, I never let go of my camera again.

These days I focus mostly on events, corporate photography, portraiture, and sports. I try to capture that special glimpse into a moment in time, the true expression, the pure emotion, the essence of the scene, to strive to hold on to that one moment, to frame it, so that it may be enjoyed over and over again. Being allowed to do so for someone else is an honor, and there is no better reward than seeing the joy in my clients' eyes.