Tips and Tricks for Taking Pictures, Pictures of Marvel’s Spider-Man 2

From the earliest days of his career as a superhero, Peter Parker has made taking pictures—pictures of Spider-Man—as vital as webslinging and crimefighting. Photojournalism is as important a part of Spider-Man’s legacy as any other aspect, and with the release of Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, there’s plenty of opportunities to snap a pic or three of Peter and Miles. But if you want photos that’d make the Daily Bugle’s front cover? Here’s a few tips from my own dream career as a Spider-Man virtual photographer.

Over the course of playing Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 for review earlier this month, I ended up unable to stop myself from taking over 200 pictures of Peter and Miles fighting crime and spinning webs. Which means I’ve had a pretty solid experience getting to grasp with all the tweaks and changes Insomniac Games made to its Spidey series’ photo mode over the course of the original game, its remaster, Miles Morales, and now the sequel.

Aside from it just being a neat way to relax and collate your own scrapbook experiencing the game, there’s something about photo mode in the Spider-Man games that gets me fiddling and tweaking (and snapping) more than any other of its kind in this age of gaming virtual photography. It’s not just because Spider-Man is one of my favorite characters of all time, but that connection to the character’s own history in photography that makes it all the more fun. These games are celebrations of what Spider-Man as an idea can be, and the legacy various versions of the character have had, across so many adapted mediums as well as the original comics. Most of the ways you engage with that legacy are through Easter-egg callback collecting, or the default modes of combat and traversal.

Even if there’s no reward for it—much to the chagrin of a young Peter Parker, no doubt—photo mode in Insomniac’s Spider-Man games feels like a way to go beyond that and play with an aspect of the character that is harder to quantify, or even gamify in some ways. Every game in the series so far has had photography side missions, but there’s nothing quite like following in the footsteps of the way Peter’s own career got started—taking a breather from the superhero escapades to pause and snap your very own Spidey-pics. So without further ado, here’s a few basic tips and tricks for how to navigate Marvel’s Spider-Man 2‘s photo mode—and, of course, plenty of my own pictures from across the Spider-Verse along the way.