

Ok first of all, taking pictures takes a bit of patience and practice. Patience because you have to be sure to focus the camera well in what you want to picture, and it takes a while to get used to it. Practice because you need a good knowledge of the tools you are going to use (mainly the keyboard and the mouse + mouse wheel), which is a bit frustrating at first.



For this picture I went through 3 steps:

1) Put the camera in front of my sim and center it how I wanted the picture to look like.

2) PUT BACK THE WALLS. To take good pictures you would like your walls to show up completely. I always play with them half showing, so that they won't block my way. Pictures without walls look strange because you can see through other rooms and the garden, and it makes the picture lose it's point and scene.

3) Shoot the picture using "C" on your keyboard!



Your pictures save in the Screenshots folder inside the Sims 3 folder. Now you can go take a look at your pictures!





When I first started taking pictures for Sims 3, I noticed there was a lack of zoom, yet I saw amazing pictures by other people. One fine day I accidentally hit the TAB key on the keyboard and... voilà! There you go, the zoomest zoom you've ever zoomed. Whenever you want to take a closeup of something, you can use the TAB key to get a better zoom of it.



Tip: When you press the TAB key, try moving your mouse. Looks like you have the camera in your hand! Use this as it is a powerful tool for taking amazing pictures.





Because it's not the same taking a picture of this bowl like this (normal zoom on live mode)...





... than this! (TAB camera mode). Zoom zoom zoom!





Now take a look at these keys. When on TAB camera mode, you can move around too! Just use the following keys to do so:



-Q: shifts the camera down (good for toddler and pets pictures, ground level)

-E: shifts the camera up

-W: let's you move forward

-S: let's you move backward

-A: moves left

-D: moves right



Now you can take pictures like a pro! Here's an example, it takes a bit of practice but you will get used to it!





It's always good to use the mouse wheel to get the camera level down a bit before you go TAB and zoom in. Also, to leave TAB mode just hit the key again.





It also works for great distance pictures.





Yaaaayyy hot air balloon!





And most importantly, now you can easily capture your toddlers taking out boogers! How cool is that? :D not really.









And then, after you take your pictures, you could always go into photoshop and touch them up a bit. Lighting is bad sometimes so touching the brightness and contrast in Photoshop is always a good idea! But this shall be another tutorial hopefully :3



I hope you've learned something or that you at least had fun looking through it. Obviously this only serves beginners, more experienced users may find this silly! But to a new simmer, things are never obvious.



Show me the pictures you get? I hope to see your legacies around!