Can You Create NFT Art From Your Own Digital Photo’s?

So, there’s been a lot of news and talk about NFT’s recently with people making. You know massive sales of NFT’s Kings of Leon, releasing their album as an NFT. So, in this video I’m going to talk about NFT for photographers, I’m going to start by talking about NFT’s kind of at a high level. I’m not going to get into a lot of technical detail, but I need to kind of explain what they are and how they work in the concepts behind them to understand the rest of the video, then I’ll, walk through and I’ll show you some real NFT’s for sale. I’ll show you how I sell my photos for NFT’s. Lastly, I want to go through and take you through and show you exactly how to sell your photos with NFT’s and at the end of the video I’ve got a massive announcement you’re going to want to stick around for so…

What is an NFT?

Well, it’s a digital token, that’s easily verifiable by the blockchain. But what does that really mean right? I think the easiest way to understand the concept is to compare it to something in real life. So, I’m going to go through and just talk about a couple of examples about kind of these concepts of tokens that are easily verifiable. You know the first example that most photographers probably know is the us copyright office.

Okay, so any photographer can take their photos and register them with the U.S. copyright office, and that gives you some sort of standing under U.S. law. Now, when you take your photos and you register them with the copyright office, they give you a token and that token is easily verifiable. You can take that token.

You can put it on the us copyright office website, and you can see who registered it so you’re. Basically, kind of saying you know this token was registered here and it’s enforceable by U.S. law. Okay, so in that case, it’s verifiable by the U.S. copyright office, but an NFT is not verifiable by any one person is verifiable by the blockchain all right.

Another example is domain names. Okay, you know. Google. com is the domain name, it’s owned by google, I personally own souvenirpixels.com, that’s where I have all my photography and I purchased that domain name from a reseller. But there’s an organization that manages domain names and domain names are unique. If somebody else goes and tries to purchase Souvenirpixels they can’t…okay.

This is a bit better example than the copyright, because domain names are sellable on a marketplace. I can take my domain name of souvenirpixels.com and sell it to someone else which you can also do with NFT’s all right. The last example that you know photographers are probably familiar with.

Digital prints? Okay, not digital prints, but real prints. You know I can take my photographs and I can go out and I can make prints and let’s say I do five of them know each of those prints is unique. You know one of five to a five three or five, so I can go and sell those prints and they are unique prints and because I say that I won’t be creating more prints, then they have more value: okay, because there’s some scarcity to it.

Now this is a good example, because if somebody comes and uses one of my prints, they can. Then they then own that print and they can go ahead and resell it right. So, they can resell it privately to one of their friends. They can list it on a marketplace like Facebook marketplace, so they can even take it to an auction house. All those things are also possible with NFT’s. Okay.

Now one of the cool things about NFT’s, though, as opposed to you know, a print that you make of one of your photos, is that it’s a smart contract…it’s a digital contract and as part of that contract, you can put in there that when an NFT is sold. So, when an NFT that represents one of your photos is sold, you can put in the contract, you get a cut, let’s say 10 percent.

So, let’s say for example, you take one of your photos and you create an NFT of it. Now maybe you sell that initial NFT for let’s say a hundred dollars, somebody purchased that in FT. Well, as you become more and more famous as a photographer, that person is then able to take that unique NFT and sell it for a thousand dollars. But if you put you get a 10% cut of the resale of the NFT in the future, then you’ll get another $100 when that sells for a thousand, if somebody sells it for $5,000 later, you get $500 now.

This is amazing for photographers right because, as your portfolio grows, your NFT’s in theory would become more and more value and you could keep getting revenue off them now. I know all this is kind of abstract, so what I’m going to do now is let’s go through and look at some NFT’s on a real NFT marketplace.

Today, I’m going to primarily be using OpenSea.

What is OpenSea?

OpenSea is the largest NFT marketplace out there right now. Think of it as like the eBay of NFT’s, but there are other marketplaces out there that are quite large as well wearable mint base and there’s more popping up all the time.

Let’s go look all right.

So, when you first go into OpenSea, you’ll see here that at the top there’s nothing here for photography. Yet now, hopefully that’ll change in the future. But there are some photographers that go in here and do upload their photos. What I’m going to do is I’ll first look at: let’s look at this Beeble every day.

This is the one that sold for a ton of cash recently, I’m just going to walk you through and show you what NFT’s look like just so you can kind of know what to expect. So, there’s a buy now button. I can go and buy this for almost half a million dollars if I want, but I won’t do that.

You’ve got your section here for the details you’re able to enter that in you know, there’s an about section, there’s more sections that you can add in here that people haven’t done, and I’ll show you how to do that in the other ones.

You can also see offers, so this is an example of the showing information from the public blockchain. So, you can see the offers here, and this is the history of it, so the trading history. So, this is how it’s publicly verifiable. You can go down here and see that this was created by people and you can see all the bids and how it’s changed hands. That’s how you know that it’s unique, because basically you can go through here and say: okay, who owns this token, and all of that is tracked on the blockchain.

So, to start my NFT collection, I’ve decided to sell NFT’s of my raw files, so these photos that I’ve created NFT’s for their photos that I created like seven or eight years ago, and these photos are already all over the web. They’re on. You know Flickr they’re on Instagram I’ve uploaded them to the stock sites. You know, in some cases these have been viewed. You know millions of times downloaded tens of thousands of times, and you know they’ve made me thousands of dollars in stock sales.

So, the question is:

Why would anybody buy the NFT?

Well, you know it’s the same with like people right, he uploads his photos on Instagram and people buy those for millions of dollars. Now, personally, I’m no people right. I do not have that big of a following, so I decided to include my raw files as part of the NFT to make them more unique because, although my photos, the jpeg versions, are all over the web. My raw files have been sitting on my computer they’ve.

Never left my computer before these NFT’s were created, so these raw files are unique right, they’re not available, and they contain more information than my jpeg files did. So, I’ve got a package in there where I’ve got my raw files. You know my original tiff files that I include the jpeg that’s also widely available. Now, one thing to know is I’m not saying this is the right way to create NFT’s. This is the way that I’ve decided to do it.

I don’t think there really is a right way right now. This technology is so new that there’s no way to know what the best way to do it, but the only thing you can do is experiment, and this is what I’ve decided to do.

For my first photos, you may decide to sell your NFT’s differently and you’ll be able to do this when I go through and do the demo of how you set up NFT’s later – and you know, I may even decide that this doesn’t work, and I may change the way that I sell NFT’s next week. Right, we’re all going to need to experiment on how we sell our photos, NFT’s to figure out kind of what works and what works for us and the type of photography that we do now.

I’ve decided to use OpenSea to sell my NFT’s um, there’s other marketplaces out there that I mentioned before wearable or mint base um I’ve decided to use OpenSea because you know I like the way that they’ve got it set up. Their prices are quite low for being on the Ethereum blockchain.

What is Ethereum?

The Ethereum blockchain is really the main blockchain that people are using to sell their NFT’s. So, I wanted to be on that blockchain and it’s simple to set up. So, I’m going to be walking you through how to set that up on OpenSea. It is similar on wearables on the other ones.

If you want me to create another video on wearable or some of the other sites on how to create an NFT something like this, just let me know in the comments and if enough people are looking at it, I’ll go and create more videos on some of those other sites as well.

So, let’s just get into luck about how you can create NFT’s by going through and creating an NFT for sale now to be able to sell on OpenSea or really any other major platforms.

You need to have an Ethereum wall up set up now, there’s lots of different options out there, I’m using Metamask. If you’re new to this, it’s an easy one to set up. It’s a chrome plug-in not going to go too much into that, because there’s lots of you know resources out there that can show you how to set that up.

Once you set it up, you can go through and create your collection. Now I’ve created a collection here called unique stock, and this is my unique stock photos now.

The reason I call it unique stock instead of like SouvenirPixels, which is you know, I have SouvenirPixels, cause my Instagram and SouvenirPixels is that for collections, the first time you upload the collections there’s certain fees associated to it, but you can have multiple people in collections. So, I’m kind of thinking ahead here. I’d like to be able to allow other photographers to more cheaply post photos to this collection and we can have a unique collection of photos. So that’s why I’ve kind of set it up this way, but you can see here I’ve so far. I’ve set up five different NFT’s and they’ve got different prices.

I’ll talk about the different ways you can sell, NFT’s OpenSea later in the video okay. So, one of the things you just do is go through set up your connection. You can set up your collections for free, it doesn’t cost any money to set those up. So, once you have the collection, we got a big button here. You can go through and add a new item.

Okay, so this is the screen where you can go through and add a new item. The first thing you can do is you can add your photo here. You can also do videos up to 100 megabytes, so I’m going to go in here and this is the photo that I am going to sell all right. So now we can go and enter name all right now. You can also have an external link if you want to put a link to your site.

You can add it in here. I’m just going to leave it, as is now. The next section is the description. Now I’ve come up with like a format that I want for this description and I’ve just kind of put that into a google sheet here. So, I’m just going to do some cutting and pasting.

So, you don’t need me to talk through it. But what I have here is I’ve just got some information about, what’s included in the unlockable content, which I’ll show you in a minute. You know some additional information about the rights and then I put keywords in here. One of the things that’s not great about OpenSea or really any of them right now. Are they don’t handle keywords?

Well, that’s something that you know it can be improved on. It’s probably needed if you’re going to look at selling photos for stock in any real way. Okay. now, the next thing we have here is properties now, there’s properties, levels, and stats and these are shown differently based on the photo. So, I’m going to jump out of here.

Let’s go back to my collections, I’ll go to my unique stock collection. Let me show you how this works, I’m going to go through here and I’m going to click on view. All you know. This is something you need to think about. Most people have a fair number of photos and you want to think about how they’re going to be viewed and organized.

So, if I look here, this is of me looking at the unique stock now I only have five photos here, but I know that I’ve got like you know 400, decent photos that I may want up here. So, I want a way to organize them.

So, you look down here on the left right. I’ve set up these different items and these are the properties, so I’ve got a category creation date, location, okay, so those are basically things you can take off so things that people may want to do when searching a photo. So, if I wanted to go through and see all my vertical photos which are shot and portrait, I can go there and show them.

I can go through and choose all minor photos right now, but I plan to add in videos later, so I could have photo or video types. I also have categories so let’s say somebody was coming through here and looking for landscapes. I can show only the landscape photos, so I specifically chose my categories in such a way that it’ll make it easier for people to filter through my collection to do that. I’ve gone through and I’ve added it to again just a simple spreadsheet here, where I can go through and choose my categories right now.

One of the things note about categories too, is, if you go into it, they’re shown on the items. So, if I come here, I can see properties. These are the properties in the big blue box, and they show stats right, like 20 percent, so there’s some stats there and there’s also the stats here. So, I’m using the stats as my image height, okay? So, I can show the stats there and if I go back to the collection and go into my view, all now I can go down here, and the stats are shown as a slider.

So, this is how people could go through and they could filter the collection based on the size. So, I can use this pixel height. If I want ones with larger pixels, I’m going to see the portrait ones so again, there’s no right or wrong way to do this. This is how I did it. You could totally set up your collection in a different way, but I wanted to set up this collection in such a way that you could handle a lot of photos and there’s an easy way for buyers to go through and to go through and filter.

And look at the different photos that they could be interested in right. So now I’m going to go back, and I’ll go and I’m going to go through just add my properties. So, the way you add, your properties, I’m going to choose media type, that’s my character and then the next one will be photo right. So, I would recommend just kind of doing this. The way I did it’s an easy way to organize it, especially if you plan on creating multiple NFT’s I just put in a spreadsheet and I’m cutting and pasting again.

This is something that having a set way to organize this is obviously a way that would be useful for photographers in the future is something that, again, we’re looking at for usage. This is something that can be used for commercial usage again. I know a lot of people buy my stuff for stock, so I put that in there. All right now, I’ve got my properties in now, I’m not using levels. You know there could be used for something like let’s say, like you have characters.

If you go around and play on here a lot of people have different pictures of people and so level someone could be handsome or pretty or whatever, and then he shows a slider on the bar. I decided not to use those in mind though. I’m just going to put the stats. Now you can have a value like three of five, but for the stats, if you set it to zero it’ll just choose the max one. So that’s what I wanted to do. so, the pixel width is going to be my first level, which I have here like I just leave, that of zero and the next one I’m going to choose is the pixel height. Now I save it now.

The next thing is the unlockable content. Okay, so I am providing people with my raw files, so if somebody purchases this, they will get access to the raw files of this photo. So, I have uploaded that to a server now again. This is an area that will probably be improved on in the future, but right now I’ve just uploaded that to a specific place on the web, where someone can go through and download it right and the supply currently on OpenSea. You can only have a supply one, but that is something that you that will be increased in the future and that’s it.

I can now go through click create and it will go through and I’m going to add that NFT to the blockchain and it will be available. Let’s go look, we’ll visit it and now you can see it here. Okay, now this isn’t for sale yet. I can sell it by going clicking on the sell button. Now. This is the first time you’re selling a photo in this collection.

You’re going to see your Ethereum wallet open and it’s going to ask you to pay some money to sell it. Now the fee that you’re going to need to pay to create your NFT isn’t a fee to sell on OpenSea. It’s a fee to do a transaction on the Ethereum blockchain.

Now I want to spend a little bit time talking about this. I know people are going to say you know, I don’t have to pay these types of high fees on other things. When I upload photos online, why do I have to do them on the blockchain?

Okay? Now, the reason is because those are on centralized servers. Now the blockchain is a decentralized network. Centralized servers are most of the places that you upload your photos. Okay, now for those of you that are new to the channel, this channel is called for Photoloo.

But it’s because our company is called Photoloo and we have a software product called Photoloo what our software product does is allows photographers to upload their photo to Photoloo, and then we distribute them to 13 different sites. So, it makes it easy for photographers to get their photos on a lot of different sites very quickly. Now we have a free version of that software, and you know some anybody can go and sign up for free for five photos a week and that is totally free, but all of that is running on servers that we pay for. So though, it’s free for the free users of the product, you know we’re paying for those servers and we pay for those transactions. If we get more free users on our service, we need to pay for more for more servers right.

Obviously, we have paid versions as well too, that have no limits, and you know people pay to have unlimited uploads to Photoloo and that pays for the free for the free users and it you know, helps us, keep the servers running and keep the company going. Now. The blockchain works differently than that the blockchain is not owned by OpenSea or wearable or any of these other companies. It’s a group of decentralized servers, so anybody can get a computer and add it to the blockchain and start processing these transactions. But why would anybody do that?

Why would you pay for a computer to pay for electricity to add to the blockchain?

Well, because of these gas fees.

Because when somebody wants to process the transaction, you’re paying for those servers and the blockchain. Well, at least the Ethereum blockchain is currently set up.

Those fees can be quite high. So, when I listed my first photo for sale originally it cost me $85 to list that for sale on OpenSea. Right now it does go by the collection, so there are ways that you can decrease your gas fees and I’ll talk a bit about that later in the video, but just know that if you’re setting up your own collection now and you’re doing it for the first time following along with me, you’re going to have to pay a gas fee, although you won’t see me do it as I go and set up.

My NFT on OpenSea right now because I’ve already paid this. Let’s go and look at how you can sell your photos on OpenSea.

So, coming back to my NFT, I’ve got it created here but now I want to go here and sell it. So, I’m going to click on the sell button. Now, there’s several different options for selling. Okay, I’m going to go through them all the first one is set price.

So, you can go through here and I can make this 0 , which I think is like about a thousand Canadian dollars right now, maybe a bit less than that. This is all going to be based in Ethereum. Now you can choose different currencies, but there’s only a couple of them that you can use, and I think it all pretty much just gets translated to Ethereum in the end. Okay, so that would be just having it as a set price, and anybody can go and buy it at that price now.

Another thing you can do is choose an ending price. So, what this will do is if I put 0.5 and point one right, then I can choose an expiration date and I’ve been using one of like into a specific date. I think all my NFT’s that I have with dates right now. I put them as May 1st, and then what will happen is today. It will be on sale for 0, but then it will slowly go down in price up until May 1st and the end price will be 0.1 okay. So, this is a way that you can set it high and then people can watch it. Then it gets down to a reasonable price. Then they would go up, buy it.

So that’s another way that you can go through and sell them is based on a declining sale right. The next way you can do it is based on the highest bidder right. So, you can have a minimum bid, let’s say: 0 5 and then have a reserve price. Okay. Now, the one limitation with this is that on auction, the reserve price is one Ethereum, okay, one ether, and that right now is around two thousand dollars.

Okay, so if you wanted to sell something for less than two thousand dollars or if you’re willing to accept less than two thousand dollars for your photo, this isn’t a good option, because people can’t bid less than two thousand dollars. Okay, so in this photo. I think what I’m going to do is I’m going to have a starting price of one ether and then I’ll have an ending price of 0.1 right and I’ll have an expiration date of 2 months, and that’s it. I can go through here and I’m going to post my listing once I get through and put this on, it’s going to ask me to sign it, which I will and now it’s going to be in and it’s added to my collection where I can go through and see that photo, but that’s it now.

You know how to create NFT’s. You can go through and create more NFT’s for your other photos, the only question is: will anybody buy them? One of the things to note is that there isn’t really a large marketplace right now for photos to be sold as NFT’s. So, if you want to sell your NFT’s you’re really going to need to promote them, probably on social media. Now, one of the things to note is that these NFT’s are built on a technology called smart contracts and NFT’s is really in its infancy right now.

I really think that smart contracts and the technology around NFT’s, even if these NFT’s don’t completely change. You know photography business. I am strongly believe that smart contracts will, one of the reasons is, is because most sales for photography are digital, these days, meaning that when photographers are selling their photos, they’re selling them as digital files. And it’s basically, you know contracts for digital assets and photography is very unique in that sense. Now, obviously, there are certain types of photography where prints are very important so like for wedding, photography and portrait photography, but a lot of the photography industry is delivering digital files for a particular contracted price and that’s where smart contracts really shine.

So, I think that you know, even if NFT’s don’t change, every photographer’s workflow smart contracts are going to change everybody’s workflow. Well, at least everybody who makes money with their photography’s workflow as the technology progresses and becomes more mature. Now I don’t want to get into smart contracts in a ton of detail. I could do a whole other video on that. If that’s something you’re interested in just, let me know in the comments I can consider creating a video on smart contracts in the future.

But one of the things to note is the smart. Contracts is digital contracts that are enforceable by code, so they have a lot of applications, especially when you’re dealing with digital assets like digital photographs and they’re, really in their infancy right now, but it’s not too hard to see how they can change the photography industry going Forward, okay, so this isn’t something that’s going to happen immediately. I don’t say think that every you know photographer is going to be using smart contracts by the end of this year, but I think of its kind of the way that I think about mirrors. Mirrorless cameras right when mirrorless cameras came out, they were in most ways inferior to the DSLR digital cameras of the time. The reason was because so much time and effort had been put into building DSLR cameras right but having a mirror in there was completely unnecessary.

The actual basics of the design for mirrorless cameras was better like if you were creating a mirrorless camera today. Nobody would think hey I’m going to take all this digital stuff and put a mirror in there and make it move right. It was, it was silly. It was left over from the film days, but it was the easiest way to get digital sensors into cameras and when the mirrorless cameras came out, they were inferior, but as more and more time and research and development got put into mirrorless cameras, they eventually got to The point where I think today, mirrorless cameras, are superior to DSLR in most ways, and it’s very easy to see today how at some point in the future, mirrorless cameras will be superior to DSLR in every way. Okay, smart contracts are kind of the same.

You know. There’s so much built up and there’s so much infrastructure and r d effort built into the current way that contracts and selling photos works. Is that they’re going to take a bit of time to get put up, but as there’s more research and development put into it? As more and more people work on fixing solutions like the high cost of the gas prices on the Ethereum network, I can totally see how, in 10 years’ time, every professional photographer is going to be working with smart contracts in some way or another. Let me give you a couple of examples.

Think about a company like Getty images. Okay, Getty images has hundreds of thousands of contracts. They’ve got hundreds of thousands of contracts with different photographers to purchase their work and resell it to buyers where they’ve got contracts with those buyers and Getty has a ton of different employees and has a ton of different computer services and has a ton of different research and development built into the fact that they can sell photos they go through process, it takes a massive cut of that sale and then give a small portion of it back to the photographer. That is one of those processes that could be done by a smart contract. Significantly more efficiently and because it was done by a smart contract more efficiently, the photographer could end up with a much larger portion of the sale of the photo okay.

So that’s just kind of one example of how I see smart contracts could be used in the future. Now another example that is a bit more abstract but is also totally doable with the technology and again not the way it is today, but with more research and development, is to have like one central repository of photos and then basically have all the sites that use Those photos use them via a smart contract. If you think about the things the way things work today, you know I go and I create a photo on my computer and I upload that photo to multiple sites. Now I use our photo do software to do that. So, I can take one photo.

I can upload it to 13 sites in a matter of minutes, but you know it’s still inefficient right. Why have that one photo sitting on 13 different, centralized servers right? Another option would be, is you could have like a universal file? Storage right that photo could serve on one server and then a photographer could give Instagram permission to show that photo and give Shutterstock permission to sell that photo at a different price via smart contracts, and this is so much more of an efficient system right. You know having that photo in one spot and having that photo can be used by all these different websites that want our photos done via smart contracts and, depending on how that’s implemented it could be implemented in a way that would be significantly beneficial to photographers. So I strongly believe that you know blockchains NFT, smart contract technology is totally going to change the way the photographers do business in the future and at Photoloo we are actively doing research and development into how we can use these technologies to kind of shift the photography business away from these large companies and bring the relationship back to the photographers, and by doing this we really think that we can bring a lot of the profit back to photographers too, when they’re selling their images.

So, though, we see a lot of ways, this technology can change the photography industry, the one that we’re focusing on right now is the sale of rights, managed photos and videos. So, if yourself your photos as right, managed photos and videos.  We would love to hear from you and especially if you’re willing to be a bit of a guinea pig for this technology. You can head over to uniqU.S.tock.io I’ll, put a link to that down. In the description and just go and sign up there and there’s a way you can, let us know that yourself your images as rights managed also, if you’re a purchaser of rights, manager’s image or if you commission, photography or videography work.

We’ve already talked to a lot of buyers. We would love to talk to more. You can also fill in on that form and, if you’re just interested in this technology and how things are going to go right again right now, we’re really focusing on photographers who sell rights, managed images either through an agency or directly. But we do, you know, hope to open this up to the general photographers and really build a way that any photographer can use contracts to make more money from their photography. So, you can go over to unique stock.

So, join the mailing list and you know you’ll be the first ones to know as we release new features that will probably be built into for lube and there’s also going to be other features. That will be kind of more marketplaces where people can buy them. And this is going to solve a lot of the problems that we have with the technology right now, especially around the gas prices right and the price to be able to list things. There are solutions out there for that, and that’s what we’re kind of focusing on. So that we can kind of move things forward for the blockchain technology in the photography community, so joining the mailing list is the best way to keep up on all our blockchain related work, but also make sure you subscribe to the channel right on this channel.