New world, new rules – Cointelegraph Magazine

Photography often has to weather disruptive changes — from film to digital, for example — and photographers find themselves needing to master new technologies or face losing out to more tech-savvy competitors. NFTs are just another transformation in how we consume images. Can photographers adapt and benefit from them?

Back in the dark ages

I go back a long time in photography. To the dark ages — or at least the darkroom ages, to be more precise — when images were analog and negatives or color transparencies had to be developed through some arcane magical process I didn’t quite understand. If you had told me you had to wave a Harry Potter wand and shout “Developus!” I would have believed you.

You could make a decent living as a professional photographer in those days. There were a lot of career avenues: portrait shops on High Street, highly paid advertising and fashion photographers, local newspapers employed “snappers,” and specialist travel or nature photographers could make money from magazines and TV.

During the 1990s, there was a huge, disruptive transformation from film to digital imaging. Anyone could do it, and smartphones started to outperform many cameras. The culture changed so that a selfie was more valid than something beautifully lit in a studio. Local newspapers folded or stopped employing professionals. It became a hard slog for many talented people. Stock photography sites cut prices and now sell images for only a few dollars, of which the photographer is lucky to get 20%.

I have noticed that the photographers who are successful are good at marketing. Many people are talented, but you have to ensure that your work is in front of the right people to make money. It’s especially important in the brave new world of NFTs, which have become popular with the art and photography communities, even among those who know virtually nothing about crypto.

How do you go about it?

Anyone can go out with their camera or smartphone and take a picture. Then you “mint,” turn it into an NFT, showcase it on a platform like OpenSea, and wait for buyers to come in… Is it really that simple? As it turns out, no, it’s not — even though you’ll sometimes hear things like this:

“June 2021 was just crazy: I had some collections completely sold out. In the short period of time till August or perhaps early September, the market was…