One of the many nifty things that comes with the World Adventures expansion pack is the new Photography skill. You can buy a cheap Instamatic-style camera in all three worlds, but you can only buy the nice cameras in Egypt. (Not sure why the nice cameras are only sold in Egypt - is Egypt some kind of bastion of photographic electronics?) As long as you're in Egypt, be sure to pick up the Photography skill book, which is only sold in the Al Simhara book store.
The cheap cameras will get your Sim started building their skills, but the pictures they take are… pretty terrible. Which is fine at first, because your Sim's early pictures are going to be bad no matter what! The Photography skill is a lot like Painting that way.
You can view your Sim's pictures, and drag them onto the walls, by clicking on the camera in your Sim's inventory page. I love to look through their pictures and laugh at the out-of-focus, blurry, crooked, and "thumb on the lens cap" early pictures! (Two examples of early Sims photography are pictured above.)
The best way to improve your Sim's Photography skill is to take lots of pictures. I recommend pausing the game as soon as you get the viewfinder screen, because otherwise people can move in and out of the shot. Annoying!
Just click on the camera in your Sim's inventory and choose "take picture." Then click P to pause the action. This lets you compose the shot at your leisure. (For some reason the up/down mouse controls are reversed. This always gives me a bit of vertigo. Push your mouse forward to pan the camera down, and vice versa.)
The more pictures you take, the better you get. And as your skills improve you unlock camera features. Soon you will be able to take larger format pictures, toggle between portrait and landscape, and have the option of black and white or sepia tone.
Your Sim's early photographs will be worth almost nothing. But as your Sim improves, the value of their photographs increases. The rarer or more difficult the shot, the more it is worth as well. And there is a collecting element, as it challenges you to complete the set.
Completing a set can be a vexing problem, because as you will quickly learn, the camera is not very good at identify what you're pointing it at! I have found that the camera misidentifies things with no rhyme or reason about half the time. Once I was pointing it straight down at the ground in the garden (trying to capture a picture of the Life Plant) and it kept telling me I was taking a picture of "Architecture"!
There isn't a bonus per se to capturing everything in a set - you don't get extra money or anything - but it can be fun to run around trying to get a picture of a thief, or a toilet. It's a great motivator to take pictures and build that skill, too!
Photography doesn't seem to be as lucrative a pastime as painting. But it can be more fun for you the human player, because you get to actually direct the photography, choose the location, line up the shots, and so forth. It's definitely worth playing with!
