Photographer goes from the Daily News to the Olympics

In Alex Slitz’s personal phrases, he failed at portray.

So, he determined to select up a digital camera, a transfer that may result in a 15-year lengthy profession at day by day newspapers throughout the nation — together with a 5 yr stint on the Daily News after school — and would find yourself placing him on Getty Images’ 120-strong group protecting the 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy.

“I could barely draw a stick figure and switched to photography,” Slitz advised the Daily News by way of e-mail from Milan. “It didn’t take long to know I wanted to be a photographer, even if I didn’t yet know which direction I wanted to take.”

Slitz, who grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, attended Western Kentucky University and took a job on the Daily News in 2009. While on the Daily News Slitz coated occasions starting from household occasions on the Bowling Green-Warren County Airport, summer season camps for kids and a sinkhole that swallowed a number of automobiles on the National Corvette Museum.

He considers the Daily News to be the place the place he “fell in love with storytelling.”

“I’m grateful I didn’t jump straight into a large market early on,” he said. “Working in smaller newsrooms forced me to do a little bit of everything and build strong fundamentals—how to earn trust, work quickly, and tell complete stories.”

After a stint in Florida working on the Scripps Treasure Coast Newspapers and a yr spent at Evansville’s Courier & Press, Slitz went to work for the Lexington Herald-Leader because the paper’s chief sports activities photographer.

Slitz’s time on the Herald-Leader was mainly spent with the University of Kentucky’s basketball and soccer groups. He left for the Charlotte Observer in 2022 and in 2023 moved to Atlanta.

Atlanta was the place he started working for Getty on a freelance-basis. This is the place a lot of Slitz’s profession highlights had been made — from break up second racing finishes to the World Series to skilled golf’s U.S. Open.

By August of 2024 he began working with the corporate full time and relocated to Houston.

“Working at Getty had been a goal from the moment I decided to pursue sports photography full time, so being able to do this work now feels like a full-circle moment,” he said.

This yr marks Slitz’s first time protecting a Winter Olympics, however he was capable of reduce his enamel within the 2024 Paralympics in Paris. His focus in Milan is on ski-jumping and cross nation snowboarding. While these sports activities are new to him, he stated the mechanics of protecting them aren’t.

“By the time I reached the international stage as a sports photographer, I felt prepared,” he said. “The scale may be different, but the process is the same.”