There has been a lot of news about NFTs recently because of big sales from artists like Beeple and big bands like Kings of Leon selling their music as NFTs. In this article I am going to walk about what this means for photographers.
I will start by explaining NFT’s at a high level, not going to get into any technical details but you kind of need to know to create your own NTFs on Opensea. Then I will show you how to sell your photo RAW files as NFT’s on the Opensea NFT marketplace.
What is an NFT?
An NFT is a digital token that is unique and easily verifiable by the blockchain. But what does that mean, let me give you some real life examples of other things that are unique tokens and easily verifiable.
US Copyright Office
Anyone can go to the US copyright office website and upload their photos then pay a small fee to get a registration number. That number is like the NFT token, anyone can easily verify it by going to the US Government website and looking it up. It shows that you registered your photos copyright and gives you some benefits under US Copyright law. However, this isn’t exactly like an NFT because you can’t resell your copyright registration.
Internet Domain Names
Internet domain names are also unique and easily verifiable. I own souvenirpixels.com because I bought it from a reseller but there is an organization that keeps track of who owns souvenirpixels.com, it is unique, if anyone else tries to register that domain they can’t. Unlike the copyright example, I can resell my domain name.
Sale of Limited Edition Prints
One last example is if a photographer decides to sell limited edition prints and probably the most accurate is limited edition prints. A photographer can take a photo, make 5 prints, sell them as a limited edition. Each is one of a kind because it is 1 of 5, 2 of 5, etc. This is a better example because whoever purchases the print can easily resell directly to another person, or put it on auction through an auction house, or even just sell it on Facebook marketplace. It is theirs now and they can do what they want with it.
Where to Sell NFTs
I know this is very abstract so let just take a look at an NFT Marketplace. Marketplaces are used to buy and sell NFTs. The largest NFT market is Opensea, think about it as the Ebay of NFTs. This is where I decided to sell my photos. Here is my Unique Stock Photos NFT collection on OpenSea
How to sell Photos As NFTs
To start my NFT collection, I decided to sell NFTs of my RAW files. So, these photos you see here were taken 7 or 8 years ago and have been posted on multiple websites, they have been downloaded thousands of times on Stock sites, millions of times on free sites and they have made me thousands of dollars.
You can go to Shutterstock and buy the full size version for a couple of bucks or download a slightly smaller version for free of Pexels, so why would anyone buy the NFT. Well first off, it is the same with the Beeple items, he publishes his stuff online, has a huge instagram following but the NFTs still have value because they are unique. Anyone can download the photo from the web but the NFTs are unique so they have value.
Now, I am no Beeple, so I decided to add something else to my NFT’s. The owner of the NFT gets access to the original RAW file for the photo. So, although these photos are on thousands of servers all over the web, the RAW files from my Camera that I used to create these photos have never been released before. So, the person who buys these NFTs will be the only person who has access to that RAW file other than me.
One thing I should note here is that I am not saying, “This is the right way for Photographers to sell NFTs”. Right now this technology is in its infancy, I will say there is no right way yet. This is the way I am trying, you may decide to try a different way, I may decide to try a different way next week. Photographers and the photography community are going to need to experiment with this technology to decide how we are going to adapt it. I will talk about that more later, for now, let me show you how I created my NFTs.
I am using Opensea to sell my NFT’s, I chose it because it was the largest marketplace out there but there are others that work in a similar way, like Superrare, Rarible or Mintbase.
Setup an Ethereum Wallet
To be able to sell on Opensea you need to have an Etherium wallet setup. I use Metamask, if you are new then just use the same one, I am not going to go into how to set that up in this video, just google it, there are lots of other resources about how to set it up.
How to Create an Opensea Collection
Now to create a NFT on Opensea you need to create a collection. Every NFT needs to belong to a collection. You will probably only one to create one collection for all your photos because there is a cost the first time you sell a photo from a collection, so you don’t want to use them like albums on your website because it would cost a lot more to sell your photos.
Anyone can create a collection for free. I decided to call mine Uniquestock because I typically sell my photos as stock photo and they are unique. Now I could have decided to use a collection called Souvenirpixels, my photography website is Souvenirpixels.com, I’m souvenirpixels on Instagram, twitter, etc. but the things about collections is they don’t need to have one creator, so my user is souvenirpixels but my collection is unique-stock. The reason I did it this way is because in the future I would like to allow other people to sell their NFTs within the same collection.
Once you have your collection create you can click the edit link then fill in the options, they are pretty self explanatory.
How to create an NFT
Now for creating the NFT, while in your collection, click the Add New Item Button
Upload your NFT file and enter name, please note that the name is the only thing searched right now on Opensea so make it search engine friendly. Next if you have an external link then you can add it, along with the description.
Next we have properties, levels and stats. These took me a while to figure out but basically they are just filters attributes to be used as filters. You can checkout my collection filters here.
Again, no right or wrong way to do this but I set it up this way because I want the collection to be easily filterable by potential stock photo buyers as it grows.
Click save and it takes a couple of seconds and the NFT is created. Now, you can get this far without paying any money, but if you want to goto the next step and put the NFT up for sale, it starts to cost money.
Now, what you need to pay, isn’t a fee to list on opensea, you actually aren’t really paying opensea at all, you are paying the blockchain to process a transaction, this is really where you need to understand a little about “the blockchain” so I am going to try to explain in the simplest terms.
This is also where people are going to ask, why do I have to pay for the blockchain when I don’t have to pay for other services, so lets look at it in that way.
If you are new to the site, you may not realize that although Photerloo is the name of the channel, Photerloo is the name of our channel it is for our company called Photerloo that I am a cofounder of. Our companies goal is to help photographers monetize their photography. We have built a website that will take your photos and upload them to multiple other sites, so every month thousands of photographers upload their photos to Photerloo and our servers push them to other sites. Now some people us our software for free but they can only upload 5 photos a week and others pay for unlimited uploads. However, now they all run on the same servers and we pay for the servers for all the users.
However, when you list your item for sale, you are listing on the Ethereum blockchain, which is a decentralized software platform. This isn’t a server owned by one company for use of that company like with Photerloo. Anyone can become part of the software platform by setting up a computer and connecting into the network. So, the computers that process this transaction are owned by many different people or companies. But it costs money to host servers, why would anyone want to add a computer to the network, well because people who want to run transactions on the network pay to run the transaction. It is called the gas cost and opensea won’t pay it for your so you are going to have to pay it the first time you list item from your collection.
Now, when I listed my first item it was $85, but that will change widely depending on the current price of the Etherium cryptocurrency and the load on the network. So, if you are following along at home it could be significantly more or less. The way you pay it is via your metamask wallet so you will need to have some ether in the wallet, I am not going to go into that on this video because buying cryptocurrency will differ based on which country you are in and change overtime, but there are lots companies that will convert your countries currency into Ether (the crypto currency that runs the Ehteriyum network. So, you can go and buy it, transfer to your Metamask wallet and then list your item.
Couple of things to note. When you first setup your collection, it is unverified which means that if I search for unique photos on open sea, I won’t find my photos yet. They say that if you get more activity then they will consider verifying a collection, so would really appreciate it if you shared my collection or even better bid or bought some of my NFT’s so I can get the unique photos collection verified.
But even being unverified, they are still for sale and you can share on twitter. I also setup an NFT section of my website.
So, that is it. You now know how to create an NFT and start selling your photos, but will anyone buy them? Obviously, there have been some very well known digital artists that have done very well with NFT’s but I don’t know of any photographers who have the same success.
However, one thing to realize is that this technology is really still its infancy. At this point you need to use your imagination a little to see the possibilities but I strongly believe that the underlying technology of the blockchain and smart contracts will completely change the business of photography in the future.
In this video I walk through some of my ideas on how NFTs will grow for the photography video, check it out.
