 So there's been a lot of news and talk about NFTs recently with people making, you know, massive sales of NFTs Kings of Leon releasing their albums as an NFT. So in this video, I'm gonna talk about NFT for photographers I'm gonna start by talking about NFTs kind of at a high level I'm not gonna 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 it. I'll show you some real NFTs for sale I'll show you how I sell my folders for NFTs Lastly, I'm gonna go through and take you through and show you exactly how to sell your photos as NFTs And at the end of the video, I've got a massive announcement that you're gonna 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 did the easiest way to understand the concept is to compare it to something in real life So I'm gonna 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 US Copyright Office And that gives you some sort of standing under US 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 and 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 US law Okay, so in that particular case, it's verifiable by the US 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 a 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.com, they can't okay This is actually 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 NFTs All right, the last example that you know photographers are probably familiar with are you know 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 Now each of those prints is unique, you know one of five, two of five, three of five So I can go and sell those prints and they're unique prints and because I say that I won't be creating more Prints than they have more value. Okay, because there's some scarcity to it Now this is a good example because if somebody comes and buys 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 of those things are also possible with NFTs Now one of the really cool things about NFTs 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% 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 NFT 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 that you get a 10% cut of the resale of the NFT in the future Then you'll get another hundred dollars when that sells for a thousand if somebody sells it for five thousand later on You get five hundred dollars. Now. This is amazing for photographers, right? Because as your portfolio grows your NFTs in theory would become more and more value and you could keep getting revenue off them Now I know all this is kind of abstracts what I'm gonna do now Let's go through and take a look at some NFTs on a real NFT marketplace today I'm gonna be primarily be using openc.io. It's the largest NFT marketplace out there right now Think of it as like the ebay of NFTs But there are other marketplaces out there that are quite large as well Rareable mint base and there's more popping up all the time. Let's go take a look All right, so when you first go into Openc you'll see here that at the top there's nothing here for Photography yet now hopefully they'll change in the future But there are some photographers that go in here and do upload their photos What I'm gonna do is I'll first take a look at let's take a look at this Beeple every day This is the one that sold for a ton of cash recently I'm just gonna walk you through and show you what NFTs 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 Beeple hasn't done and I'll show you how to do that in Other ones. You can also see offers. So this is an example of 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 Beeple 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 NFTs of my raw files So these photos that I've created NFTs 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, flicker. 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 actually the same with like Beeple, right? He uploads his photos on Instagram and people buy those for millions of dollars. Now personally, I'm no Beeple, 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 actually never left my computer before these NFTs were created. So these raw files actually are unique, right? They're not available and they can date 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 and I include the JPEG that's also widely available Now one thing to note is that I'm not saying this is the right way to create NFTs 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 NFTs differently and you'll be able to do this when I go through and do the demo How you set up NFTs later on and you know, I may even decide that this isn't work And I may change the way that I sell NFTs next week, right? We're all gonna need to experiment on how we sell our photos NFTs to figure out kind of what works and What works for us in the type of photography that we do? Now I've decided to use OpenSea to sell my NFTs There's other marketplaces out there that I've mentioned before a wearable or mint base 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 The Ethereum blockchain is really the main blockchain that people are using to sell their NFTs So I want it to be on that blockchain and it's pretty simple to set up So I'm gonna be walking you through how to set that up on OpenSea It is similar on wearable of some of the other ones If you want me to create another video on wearable or some of the other sites and how to create an FT Something similar 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 NFTs by going through and actually creating an NFT for sale Now to be able to sell on OpenSea really any other major platforms You need to have an Ethereum wallop set up now. There's lots of different options out there I'm using MetaMask if you're new to this it's a pretty easy one to set up It runs as a clone plugin not going to go too much into that because there's lots of you know resources out there They can show you how to set that up once you've 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 that I call it a unique stock instead of like souvenir pixels, which is you know I have souvenirpixels.com my Instagram is souvenir pixels is that For collections the first time you upload to collections. There's certain fees associated to it But you can actually have multiple people in collections. So I'm kind of thinking ahead here I'd actually 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 particular way But you can see here. I've so far I've set up five different NFTs and they've got different prices I'll talk about the different ways you can sell NFTs and OpenSea later on 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 a hundred megabytes So I'm gonna go in here and this is the photo that I am going to sell All right, so now we can go in enter name Now you also have an external link if you want to put a link to your site you can add it in here I'm just gonna 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 gonna 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 I put keywords in here one of the things It's not great about OpenSea really anything right now is they don't handle keywords well That's something that you know it can definitely be improved on is probably needed if you're gonna look at selling photos for stock in any Railway, 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 gonna 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 gonna go through here, and I'm going to actually click on you 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 take a look here, this is if me looking at the unique stock 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 in portrait I can go there and show them I can go through and choose, you know, all minor photos right now But I plan to add in videos later on so I can have photo or video types I also have categories So let's say somebody who's coming through here and looking for landscapes I can show only 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 Okay Now one of the things to 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% have this trait of pit meadows 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 actually shown as a slider So this is how people could go through And they can filter the collection based on the size So I can use this pixel height If I want one's 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 Now I'm going to go back and I'll go and I'm going to go through and 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 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 NFTs I just put it 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 It's something that again we're looking at at Fortaleau 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 Levels you know they 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 like 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 All right so last 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 want it 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 So I am providing people with my raw files So if somebody purchases this They'll 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 And the supply currently on open C You can only have a supply one But that is something that will be increased in the future And that's it I can now go through and click create And it will go through And I'm going to add that NFT to the blockchain And it will be available So I'm going to Let's go take a look We'll visit it And now you can see it here Now this isn't for sale yet I can sell it by going and clicking on the sell button Now if this is the first time You're selling a photo in this collection You're going to see your Ethereum wallet open up 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 open C It's actually a fee to do a transaction on the Ethereum blockchain Now I want to spend a little bit of 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 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 Fortaleau But it's because our company is called Fortaleau And we have a software product called Fortaleau What our software product does Is allows photographers to upload their photo to Fortaleau And then we distribute them to 13 different sites So it makes it really 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 somewhere 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 although it's free for the free users of the product You know we're paying for those servers And we pay for those transactions And if we get more free users on our service We need to pay 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 Fortaleau And that pays for the free users And 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 Rarible 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 Pay for electricity to add it to the blockchain Well because of these gas fees Because when somebody wants to process a transaction You're paying for those servers And the way 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 it So let's go and take a 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 a number of 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 0.5 Okay 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 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 that you can do is Choose an ending price So what this will do Is if I put 0.5 and 0.1 Right Then I can choose an expiration date And I've been using one of like you can choose a specific date And all my NFTs 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 0.5 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 and buy it So that's another way that you can go through and sell them Is based on a declining sale All right The next way you can do it is based on the highest bidder All 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 $2,000 Okay So if you wanted to sell something for less than $2,000 Or if you're willing to accept less than $2,000 for your photo This isn't a really good option Because people can't bid less than $2,000 So in this particular 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 All right And I'll have an expiration date of two 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 Right I can go through and see that photo But that's it Now you know how to create NFTs You can go through and create more NFTs for your other photos The only question is 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 NFTs So if you want to sell your NFTs You're really going to need to promote them Probably on social media Now one of the things to note Is that these NFTs are built on a technology Called smart contracts And NFTs is really in its infancy right now I really think that smart contracts And the technology around NFTs Even if these NFTs 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 is 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 NFTs 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 just in Just let me know in the comments So I can consider creating a video On smart contracts in the future But one of the things to notice Is that smart contracts are 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 it kind of the way That I think about 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 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 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 DSLRs In most ways And it's very easy to see today How at some point in the future Mirrorless cameras will be superior to DSLRs 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 fixed exclusions 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 But 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 service And has a ton of different research and development Built into the fact that they can sell photos They go through process it Take 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 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 Or 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 and 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 An other option would be Is you can 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 shutter stock 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 at one spot Than having you know how 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 Blockchain's NFT smart contract technology Is totally going to change the way that Photographers do business in the future And at Fortaleau 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 you sell 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 uniquestock.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 you sell your images as rights managed Also if you're a purchaser of rights managed 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 uniquestock.io 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 forlub 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 of our blockchain related work But also make sure you subscribe to the channel Right on this channel I talk about Making money with your photography So if that interests you at all It probably does if you made it this far in the video Make sure you go down and subscribe Also if you haven't tried Fotolou yet If you're interested in making money Fotolou can upload your photos to 13 different sites Again it's still in the centralized server model But when we do add the features to upload to the blockchain In the short term we'll probably need to keep them on centralized servers Pushing them to the blockchain That'll be done via Fotolou So if that interests you at all You can go in and sign up for a free version I'll put a link up here somewhere Where you can go and try it out Best of luck selling your photos online