Uses
The kit.
What he carries into a house, what he flies over it, and what the business runs on. The tooling is always temporary, so this page is dated. Updated October 2026.
Carried in
- Camera
- Sony full-frame mirrorless, with wide lenses chosen for interiors.
- Light
- Blended exposures and HDR for most rooms, flash where the window would otherwise win.
- 360
- A 360-degree rig for virtual tours, captured through Matterport, Ricoh360, Zillow 3D and EyeSpy360 depending on the listing.
- Plans
- A LiDAR scan on site, delivered as 2D and 3D floor plans with room dimensions. The square footage is gross internal area, measured to the inside face of the exterior walls.
- Access
- Supra lockbox access, so nobody has to be home.
Flown
- Drone
- DJI, flown under an FAA Part 107 remote pilot certificate, for aerial stills and video, including vacant lots with parcel boundary overlays.
Edited on
- Photos
- Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop, with Skylum Luminar for some work.
- Video
- Cut and encoded on his own server with ffmpeg pipelines, delivered through mlsvideos.com, the unbranded listing-video platform he specified and runs.
- Documents
- Adobe Acrobat Pro.
The business runs on
- Sites
- aaronwellsphotography.com, rebuilt in Astro with 35 city landing pages and a self-service admin panel. This site, hand-structured HTML and one stylesheet.
- Servers
- Debian and Ubuntu virtual machines he administers himself: Nginx and Caddy, PHP-FPM, Python, systemd timers, UFW, fail2ban, Let’s Encrypt, Cloudflare in front.
- Data
- SQLite where it is enough, PostgreSQL where it is not, including the BLUFify platform’s FastAPI and PostgreSQL stack.
- Analytics
- Self-hosted, reconciling server logs, edge metrics and first-party events. Google Analytics was removed.
- Development
- Claude Code, directed by written specification. He defines what gets built and verifies that it works; he does not write the code.
- Backups
- Layered, scheduled, with freshness alerts, and a reboot policy that waits for the video encode queue to clear.
Specific lens and model numbers are deliberately left out; they change, and nobody books a photographer for the serial number.