Alexander Sweetwood
President
Leading one of America's largest independent camera retailers with two locations, serving photographers and creators since 1947.
Our Stores
What I'm Building
A handful of companies and projects I'm working on — in retail, hospitality, and giving back.
Things I'm Tinkering With
Experiments and prototypes — AI sports tracking, live scoring boards, product-card designs, satellite tracking, and framing tools.
Sports Video, Tracked by AI
On the side I run Unique Replay— live streams and full-game replays for a local softball league — and I've been teaching it to watch itself. Computer vision reads every pitch straight off the same broadcast camera. I built the whole thing: the vision model, the calibration, the scoring, and the broadcast pipeline.
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 — no sensors on the field, no extra gear for the umpire. A tape-measured, two-camera calibration turns the pixels into true feet and unlocks exit velocity on batted balls.
Engineering, End to End
I'm a hands-on architect, and if I had to pick one word for how I work, it's tenacious. I've designed and built across the entire stack that runs Unique Photo — the storefront, the GraphQL layer, the search and data pipelines, the payment and shipping integrations, the iOS app, and the cloud it all runs on. Most of it I wrote myself, top to bottom — and I stay on a problem until it's genuinely solved, not just quieted.
From the micron to the cloud
The same diagnostic instinct I bring to code, I bring to everything. I understand how the whole thing works — from the electron path on a board down to the micron, up through the firmware, the network, the database, and the cloud that ties it all together. What actually cracks a hard problem isn't any one trick — it's being tenacious, plus an intuition built from hundreds of thousands of hours in the work. I don't stop at the symptom or swap parts and hope; I trace a problem to its real root and stay on it until it's fixed. A race condition in checkout, a failing drive in a rack, a packet dropping on a bad route, a board that's quietly gone dark — same method, different layer. I take things apart, learn exactly how each layer talks to the next, and fix what most people just replace. Layered onto that is the operations side — logistics, inventory, and the math behind moving real product every day. And honestly? I still write a plain little for-loop just for the fun of it. 😄
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