Good photography often requires as much technical skill as artistic sensibility, making it uniquely fit for experimentation in Web3. Yet, talk to any non-fungible token (NFT) collector or creator and they’ll say it took a while for “photography NFTs” to take off.

John Knopf, an Emmy Award-nominated landscape photographer who works for National Geographic, was an early adopter. While he came into crypto during the heady days of the NFT bull market thinking he could make a “quick buck,” he said, he quickly became enthralled with the potential of distributed networks.

“Web3 is all about elevating one another and working to advance the art form,” Knopf said. Together with seven other prominent photographers – Alejandro Cartagena, Ben Strauss, Cath Simard, Dave Krugman, Isaac “Drift” Wright, J.N. Silva and Ravi Vora – Knopf helped found FOTO, a collective geared at training artists to work in Web3.