Alexander Sweetwood
President
Unique Photo is one of America's largest independent camera retailers and has served photographers since 1947. We have two flagship locations, each with its own photo lab, classrooms, rental counter, trade-in desk and used department, plus 75,000 sq ft of distribution that's on its way past 100,000. I packed my first package here in 1990 and came on full time in 2004, through college and after. I also build most of the software the company runs on.
What I'm Tinkering With
This is the fun stuff. Some of it is half-built, but all of it is live and you can click around. There's AI calling balls and strikes off a broadcast camera, the scoreboard our field runs on, an app that turns a photo into a beadwork pattern, and a live map of the satellites overhead. None of these are mockups. They're all running right now.
Our Stores
We Opened Philadelphia
Our second store opened on 2nd Street in Old City in November 2019. It's twelve thousand square feet over four floors, with retail, classrooms, a professional photo lab, a rental counter, repair, and a studio on the top floor.
I set up the networking for it, including the closets and switches, the firewall and VPN, and the point-of-sale.
A Rooftop Deck Above Old City
We're building out the roof right now and the framing is going in. You get the Philadelphia skyline on one side and Old City rooftops on the other. The store will use it for shoots and events, like golden hour and portrait sessions, and some classes will head up there instead of staying in the classrooms. It should be ready soon.
Twenty Years at Unique Photo
I started here in 2004, part-time, while I was still in school. I went through college, finished my MBA in 2010, and came on full-time that year. I built everything below for this company, and I still write most of it myself.
Unique Photo is one of America's largest independent camera retailers and has served photographers since 1947. We have two flagship locations, each with its own photo lab, classrooms, rental counter, trade-in desk and used department, plus 75,000 sq ft of distribution that's on its way past 100,000. There are 100+ people here, and I build the software all of it runs on.
What I Built Here
Our own ERP and the storefront that sits on top of it. Orders, inventory, purchasing, shipping, payments, the warehouse, the lab and the registers all run on software we own.
What I'm Building
Companies and projects I'm working on right now in retail, logistics, software, sports and charity.
Hudson Coffee
This is opening day. We cut the ribbon with the city, Hoboken PD and the fire department there, and poured a lot of coffee. It's the newest thing on this page and the only one you can drink. We have a La Marzocco on the bar, our own beans and cups, and a room people actually want to sit in. Most of what I do ships in a box or runs on a server, so it's nice to have one you can walk into.
Sports Video Tracked by AI
On the side I run Unique Replay, which does live streams and full-game replays for a local softball league, and I've been teaching it to follow the game on its own. Computer vision reads every pitch straight off the same broadcast cameras that carry the game. There are no sensors or radar guns, and the umpire doesn't need any extra gear. It all comes from the video. I built the whole thing, including the cameras and the box at the field, the vision and calibration, the live scoring, the on-screen graphics, and the setup that gets the broadcast online by itself.
Every pitch measured from the broadcast camera
The AI watches each slow-pitch, measures how high the ball arcs in real feet, flags an illegal arc, and calls strike or ball, without any sensors on the field. We calibrated the two cameras with a tape measure, which turns pixels into real feet and also gives us exit velocity on batted balls.
Nobody has to press go
There's a small computer at the ballfield that runs game day by itself. It turns on the TVs and the cameras, goes live on YouTube on time, records in 8K, and runs the scoreboards and the PA. After the last out it uploads a clean copy and shuts everything down. If the internet drops it switches to cellular, and if a service crashes it restarts it. I've never had to be there for it to work.
The tracking still needs work. I'm teaching a 180° panoramic camera to chart where every batted ball lands, and the arc measurement gets better every week I feed it another game. It's still R&D, but it runs on real games in front of real people.
The Engineering Side
I'm a hands-on architect, and if I had to describe how I work in one word, it's tenacious. I've designed and built pretty much every part of what runs Unique Photo: the storefront, the GraphQL layer, search and data pipelines, payment and shipping integrations, the iOS and Android apps, and the cloud it runs on. I also wrote a programming language runtime from scratch to replace one we were renting, and I taught a camera at a ballfield to call balls and strikes. I wrote most of it myself, and I don't let go of a problem until it's actually fixed.
Systems I've Built
These don't have a public link you can click. They're the systems behind the storefront, the warehouse, the registers and the ERP. I designed and wrote them myself, and the company runs on them every day.
Hardware too
I troubleshoot everything the same way I troubleshoot code. I know how the whole thing works, starting with the electron path on a board down to the micron and going up through the firmware, the network, the database and the cloud on top of it. Hard problems mostly get solved by being tenacious, along with the intuition you pick up over hundreds of thousands of hours doing the work. I don't stop at the symptom or swap parts and hope. I trace the problem back to what's really causing it and stay on it until it's fixed. A race condition in checkout, a failing drive in a rack, packets dropping on a bad route or a board that's quietly gone dark all get the same approach. I take things apart, figure out how each layer talks to the next, and fix things most people would just replace. I also handle the operations side: logistics, inventory, and the math behind moving product every day. I still write a plain little for-loop now and then just for fun. 😄
Chat with our AI assistant
Ask about gear, orders, store hours or anything else about photography. It answers right away and can pass you to a real person.