NFT 101 for Photographers Part 1: The Essentials, with Lindsay Adler

Written by Lindsay Adler
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Published on March 11, 2021
NFTs for photographers
NFTs for photographers
Lindsay Adler
Adorama ALC

NFTs, aka Non-Fungible Tokens. If you haven’t heard, this term is taking over the internet and the art, tech and photography worlds right now. Many artists are thrilled because this technology provides a way to sell their imagery as limited-edition digital art. Today, I’ll decode the world of NFTs for you, including what NFTs are and what they mean for photographers.

If you have heard of NFTs before it’s probably because some artists are making literally millions from this new form of art sale. I personally know photographers who have sold a single digital piece for more than $20,000, so of course there is a lot of energy around this topic right now! Speaking personally, I’m beyond excited and that’s why I want to share what I’ve learned with my photo community.

As I mentioned, NFT stands for non-fungible token. Non-fungible basically means that something is unique and can’t be replaced with something else. As we all know a digital image can be copied and screenshotted, shared, and duplicated endlessly. This is where NFTs save the day. They allow you to create something that can’t be duplicated: the ownership of the artwork! Think of it as a digital fingerprint, or signature, or certificate of authenticity for your photo. In short, NFTs allow you to create limited editions of your digital work, all while you retain the copyright.

There is a lot more to unpack here so I want to start at the very beginning, and let me be clear: I am definitely going to oversimplify some concepts since it can be rather in-depth and overwhelming.

Want to nerd out and dive deep down the NFT rabbit hole? There is a wealth of resources out there to help you understand blockchain, cryptocurrency, and NFT standards more. If you are new to this, I think it just makes it all the more confusing and overwhelming, so let’s keep it simple, shall we?

NFT 101 for Photographers: Part 1

While I’m no seasoned expert, I’d love to save you the time reading the endless draining articles filled with confounding jargon. I’ve created an NFTs for photographers three-part series just for you!

  • In part 1, I’m going to help you understand the fundamentals of NFTs and what they mean to photographers and other artists. Plus, I’ll try to help simplify the confusing concepts behind digital tokenized art in general.
  • In part 2, I’ll show you how to set up your very first piece of NFT art, including the steps of the process from setting up a wallet, minting, and more. I’ll also break down a lot of the jargon.
  • In part 3, I’ll share some of the best practices for NFT art that I’ve gleaned and we will take a look at my very first NFT minting, including what I learned from that process. Now, to be clear, I haven’t sold one at the time of this article; this is all new to me too and we are on this journey together!

Physical art vs. digital art worlds

Let’s start in the physical world, and how selling prints of your photography works in fine art. (And reminder to budding photographers out there: Cameras with top-notch sensors, such as the Canon EOS R5 with its 45MP sensor, or the Sony A7RIV with 61MP sensor, offer impressive printing resolution options.)

Typically you select one or a collection of your photographs to print. When you print them, you decide upon their edition. In other words,  you determine their scarcity which helps give them value. You are deciding if you’ll only ever print one version of the print, aka an edition of one, or an edition of 10, or 50, or even more. An open edition means you have no limit on the number of times you print and distribute the photograph.

Next, each print has a signature, an edition number (aka it’s number two in an edition of 10), and then a certificate of authenticity. This certificate is your way of validating that the image is yours and that you’ve authorized its distribution. Put another way, it proves that the print is real and this is incredibly important for collectors to prove their ownership and the authenticity of the editioned print.

I mean, think about it. Technically someone could snap a high res photo of your photo hanging in a gallery, print it out, and pretend it was “real.” It’s the certificate that proves ownership.

NFTs do the same thing in the digital space.

So, let’s move over into the digital world and think about art. Think about NFTs as your certificate of authenticity or your signature. It’s the “deed of ownership.”  You can decide how much scarcity you want, and NFTs (and the technology and systems behind them) make sure that it can’t be counterfeited.

Basically, when you “tokenize” and “mint” your art, you are establishing ownership of the art and how many editions of the image are available. Then, the blockchain acts as a super redundant record of who buys and owns your art. We’ll talk about blockchain in a moment, but basically it is a public ledger or record that is unchangeable and tamper-proof, which guarantees and keeps track of the ownership of your digital art.

Pretty awesome, right?

So what does this digital art process look like in action?

  1. I create or select my artwork that I plan to tokenize or mint, meaning what I plan to make an NFT.
  2. I decide the platform or marketplace that I will sell the artwork on. Think of it like an art gallery! Technically you can still sell NFT pieces on your own (though it’s far more complicated), but the different platforms already have an audience of art buyers looking to invest in your work! Some have different rules and benefits, which I’ll talk about in future articles.
  3. Next, I decide on the edition of the artwork, just like selling a fine art print. I get to determine the scarcity.
  4. I must then decide upon a reserve bid. In other words, what’s the minimum I’m willing to sell my artwork for. Furthermore, I can also choose a percentage royalty I want to receive each time a buyer sells my artwork to someone else.
  5. Lastly, I “mint’ my artwork, making it available for sale. Minting is when your NFT certificate is actually created and put up in the blockchain, making it non-fungible (aka cannot be replaced or duplicated).

Guess what? It’s a lot like selling fine art prints, except now the artists have a lot more control and you don’t have to give huge commissions to galleries.

Ownership and consumption in art

Hopefully you’re still with me, but I bet some of you still have gut instincts that make this all feel bizarre.

You may think “Wait, can’t people just screenshot your digital image? So what’s the point?”

Here’s how I think of it. When you go to a museum, you can look at the art on the wall. You can take it all in and consume it, enjoy it, be inspired by it. You could take a photo of the painting and print it out and hang it in your living room. Or you could even pop over to the museum store and maybe pick up a poster of that favorite piece.

Do you own that artwork? Not at all. Did you still get to see it and enjoy it? Yes!

The same is true of digital art. Yes, someone could still screenshot your photograph or steal it off of your website, but that’s not the same as owning or investing in your artwork.

In the past it seemed impossible for someone to own a limited edition of a digital piece of artwork. Couldn’t they just duplicate the file? Couldn’t they just share it? How would you prove someone owns it?

That’s where blockchain and NFTs come in.

NFTs are supported by blockchain. To way oversimplify the idea, blockchain means that there are many public ledgers (aka records) of the proof of ownership of this piece on many different servers. This helps to ensure that the records can’t be tampered with; there is this complex network of redundancies. In short, no one can steal ownership of the art or create a counterfeit.

So, you aren’t necessarily putting the actual digital file in the blockchain. You are creating a token like a certificate of authenticity up on the blockchain that is tied to your artwork.

Back to our fine art example, NTFs allow digital artwork to have scarcity the same way as the painting at the museum. Sure, anyone can look at your images online but they don’t own or have permission to own that artwork. You determine how many “tokens” of your artwork are available and blockchain makes sure to protect that ownership.

NFTs assign ownership, and importantly, allow people to invest in you! 

Copyright

As a business-savvy photographer you are probably also asking, “Wait, do I still own my copyright?”  Yes! For example, if you were selling a physical print, the owner of that print wouldn’t have the right to use your image for commercial use. Their only rights would be to sell the image to another buyer and to display the artwork. (By the way, there are already companies catered to display digital art and NFTs).

On a side note, in the future, I think NFTs will be a powerful way for commercial photographers to use smart contracts to make sure that companies aren’t using images for more than previously agreed upon. I think it will be a great tool for licensing and usage, but that’s still a bit in the future. 

Value

When I first heard about all this stuff, I kept dwelling on the question “how are these tokenized pieces of art worth anything?” If they don’t own anything physical or the copyright, why are people willing to spend money on something like that?

It’s a weird concept, but if you think back to other collectibles that have been around for decades (even a century), it’s not that usual. 

As always with a collectible, it’s only worth what someone is willing to pay for that thing. In other words, what’s its perceived value? Trading cards are a perfect example, whether sports cards, Magic the Gathering cards, or Pokemon cards. Why are those worth anything? They are just a piece of cardboard, after all.

Some may say it’s the rareness or scarcity of the card, but why is a card worth anything at all? It’s based on how much someone is willing to pay for it.

Same thing in the digital world! 

Guess what? There are already NFTs for a wide range of playing cards and digital games. TONS.

Ever heard of CryptoKitties?  If you haven’t looked it up and be prepared to have your mind blown. Yes, people have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single digital cat token. Think this is insane? Perhaps no more insane than giving similar value to a real-life playing card, made out of cardboard.

NFTs stirring up the art world

For the past several years, NFTs have started to get a lot of hype in the art world. In fact, recently owners of a piece of artwork by Bansky (a famous graffiti/street artist) actually burned their piece and then ‘minted it’ online as an NFT, where it sold for more than the original piece of art. 

Does that blow your mind and seem absolutely bizarre? That’s kind of the point! We’ve always explored the concept of  “what is art?”  A few decades ago street art wasn’t considered art. Until recently digital art wasn’t considered art and it’s still trying to gain respect in the formal art world.  How this all continues to evolve is anyone’s guess, but it is certainly getting a lot of buzz right now and people are spending millions on digital art.

I could talk about this extensively, but instead I’ll share some artists and other valuable NFTs to look into yourself. Take a look at Beeple, CryptoKitties, NyanCat, and many more.

NFT of photographic art

At the time of writing this article, there are not many massive success stories of photographers selling NFTs, but that doesn’t mean it’s not coming! Actually, I think it’s coming at us quickly. In fact, while writing this article, photographer Kate Woodman earned more than $20,000 off of a single digital tokenized image, and she’s not the only one. The discussion in the photo space has increased exponentially in just the last few weeks and photographers are beginning to enter the space.

Through a combination of awareness and promotion of photography as NFT, this market will certainly grow not only for photographers participating but also for art collectors seeking to invest.

My first NFT drop (My “Genesis Drop”)

As an image-maker I have been creating still-motion hybrid artwork (often called cinemagraphs) for more than a decade. Originally I was creating these moving images for the digital versions of fashion magazines and at times for commercial clients like A&E and Dewars scotch. I also created moving art for the sake of art, and you can check out some of these art pieces in my portfolio.

While I may certainly offer purely still images for sale as NFTs in the future, I love the idea that my cinemagraphs finally have a platform to be appreciated and collected. As I go through the process of creating my first NFT, I am documenting each step to help other photographers and those details will be in my next video.

If you want to follow my journey, my genesis drop (aka my first minting/sale) will be Wednesday March 17th! I’ll share the details soon and I can’t wait to share my insights on this exciting new world.

Note to readers: As you wait to see Lindsay’s upcoming genesis drop, here’s a reminder of what you’ll find in her kit—a helpful insight so you can go out and create just like her! 

Lindsay Adler
Lindsay Adler is a fashion photographer, educator, and author based in New York City. You can follow her work, and see her photography on her website, lindsayadlerphotography.com, or on Instagram @lindsayadler_photo.