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.
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Let’s start off with the most basic of basics: how to actually get into photo mode in the first place. By default, it’s pretty clunky—you press the options button on your PS5 Dualsense to pause the game, and then select Photo Mode out of the available menu options. It’s an extra layer of friction and more often than not can be frustrating if you’re trying to capture multiple shots of a specific moment one after the other, but good news, you can remove that friction (more on that later).
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Once you’re actually in Photo mode and the game world is paused, there are four “tabs” you can operate in to help take your snap, navigable by tapping the Square Button on your controller. The first and most important tab is Camera Mode. This is where you’ll do your actual movement of the camera with the joysticks, but it’s also where you tweak everything from the FOV (field of view) to zoom in and out, the rotation of your shot, the level of exposure, and even finite details like the size/presence of film grain or a vignette around the edges, or the aperture of your camera to shift the focus in the scene. It’s also where you’ll apply filters or photo frames, more on that later.
In any of the four modes you can press the Triangle Button to hide the UI, before you snap your shot by tapping the Create Button on the Dualsense. No one wants to see the menu on top of your creation!
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Although Camera Mode is where you’ll do the bulk of your tweaking, you’ll probably want to check out the other tabs first before you finalize whatever shot you’re going for. Character Mode is where you can pick from a series of pre-arranged poses—for those moments you didn’t quite manage to pause and capture an animation you liked, or for setting up different kinds of shots. Miles and Peter have 20 poses to choose from each: 10 for when they’re on the ground, 10 for when they’re in the air.
Beyond those poses, this is also where you can tweak the “expression” of the eye lenses on their suits, too—you can only change these if you’re using one of the custom pose options, though.
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Lighting Mode is where you can either manipulate the actual natural lighting of a scene—by tweaking the rotation and elevation of the sun or moon and its brightness, or the level of ambient light—or place up to three artificial light sources around the space you’re shooting in.
These artificial lights can either be spheres of illumination, or spotlight-style light sources that you can use to cast more directional cones of light. You can change their color across the RGB spectrum, their intensity, and even the size of the area they cast their light in regardless of intensity, as well as toggle if they cast shadows on objects and characters in the world.
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Sticker Mode lets you layer up to 10 different stickers and prints on a scene—everything from blank speech bubbles or other comic book accoutrements like title logos and cover page corner boxes, to certain words and phrases, or even chibi-fied versions of Peter and Miles. You can be as gaudy as you want!
So that’s the basics of each mode in Photo Mode. Now, here’s some tips about how to get the most out of it!
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First things first: remember how we mentioned getting into Photo Mode was kind of clunky? You can make it much easier by going into the accessibility options in the menu and assigning Photo Mode to a shortcut button on your controller’s D-pad. Instead of having to pause and then go into a menu, that means you can get into photo mode in a single press.
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Assigning a shortcut button makes it easy to back in and out of Photo Mode so you can get the exact part of whatever you’re trying to snap with as little frustration as possible—whether it’s timing the right moment in a take down attack, or the exact spot Peter and Miles thwip their webs swinging through the city, you don’t have to commit to the initial moment you paused the game. Push it if you want and see what you get!
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Unlike Miles Morales and Marvel’s Spider-Man and its remaster, currently Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 doesn’t unlock the option to change the time of day once you’ve finished the game, which means you’re left (incredibly mild spoiler for the status of weather at the end of Marvel’s Spider-Man 2) with the default, sunny mid-day setting. That may change in updates post-launch, but for now, if you’re a dedicated photographer of Spider-Men, create a separate save file in one of the available slots if you want to go back and shoot at specific times of day, like night or sunset.
This is also good advice if you’re coming up on a moment you want to revisit, like a big boss battle or a sequence where you’re playing as a character in their civilian-wear, as there is also currently not a way to replay missions after you’ve finished the game, or go into a “New Game Plus” save with all your unlocked costumes.
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You don’t always have to use them, but going into Lighting Mode and setting up a few extra light sources can take a flat photo into something really dynamic and vibrant. Artificial lights can be used to do as little as provide a small source if your character is turned away from the primary light in a scene and underlit, or you can go crazy with the colors and create something psychedelic.
The shot above, for example, has a lot of natural light in it already from the energy attack Miles is unleashing. But I placed three extra light sources into the scene—one bright white sphere tight to Miles’ chest to cast more dramatic shadows, one dark blue spotlight to underscore the shadows in the background, and a matching electric pink to accent the colors on Miles’ suit and break up all the shades of blue. Experiment with what looks fun to you!
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But to re-emphasize: just because you can add more lights and go buckwild with the colors, doesn’t mean you always should. Sometimes a moment is lit fine as-is, or maybe all you need to do is tweak the natural lighting to avoid an awkward shadow here and there. Other times where you do want to set an extra light up, consider using it as a chance to emphasize the natural lighting that’s already present in the scene.
Think about it: where is the sun or moon in your shot? Are there any other light sources you might want to amplify, like the haze of a streetlamp or passing cars? Matching the colors and positioning of those other sources lets you amplify the natural lighting already in a scene on your own terms, without making something that feels too artificial. In the meme-tastic shot above, for example, there are two extra light sources placed just off camera: behind Peter on a lamplight to accentuate its glow enough so it casts light on Miles too, and a white light near a car’s headlights passing by Miles to knock up the shadows.
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Tweaking the aperture of your in-game lens can really change the look of your final shot. The higher the aperture, the more out-of-focus objects beyond the view distance can appear. Pulling in the view distance and ramping up the aperture can give a photo a more portrait-esque feeling, or you can use the lack of focus to obscure things in the background you don’t want people to, well, focus on.
You can also tweak the foreground aperture and focus in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, letting you blur elements and characters closer to the camera so you can draw focus on specific planes in your shot.
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By default, most pictures you take in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 will be horizontally aligned. But sometimes, it’s worth completely rotating your camera view 180 degrees and taking a vertically framed shot. It can be used to amplify height and scale, or draw a focus on a slim-profile like a webswing or a character portrait. Hell, sometimes it’s just nice to change it up a bit. While saving screenshot to your PS5 will always save it horizontally, you can use the PlayStation app on your phone to save captures locally and use external apps and photo editors to rotate your image to the desired framing. You can also use those apps to crop vertical images to an aspect ratio smaller than 16:9 of you want.
If you’re anything like me, you can, and will, develop a crick in your neck tilting your head to one side or another staring at your horizontally aligned TV while tweaking this as you can’t rotate the menu to match, so... don’t be dumb like I am.
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Sometimes you’ll pause for Photo Mode at the perfect moment and find that your ideal shot is messed up by motion blur, or obscuring energy blasts, or even things like rain effects. There’s an option at the bottom of the first pane on Camera Mode called “Visual Effects” that you can pause or enable.
By default, they’re paused, but enabling them lets certain elements of the world unpause—like the swaying of leaves on a tree, or those aforementioned VFX additions like energy bolts or rain, or even things like the splatter of spit out of a goon’s mouth once you’ve punched them. Similar to our stop-and-start tip, you can toggle between pausing and unpausing to get just the right amount of effects on your shot, or let them pass entirely to give you something a bit more clean.
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A feature added in Miles Morales and the PS5 and PC remasters of the first game is the option to swap your character’s costume from the wardrobe you’ve unlocked while in Photo Mode, which means you don’t have to sacrifice the perfect moment you’ve paused or wearing a specific suit you like to play in if you want to change things up for a shot. Added in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 as well is the ability to swap suit styles too, so you change up the color palette too. Experiment a little, and see if swapping suits changes the tone and shot you were going for.
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You’ve framed your shot, you’ve set up extra lighting, you have your perfect costume selected. You can leave it there, but one of the last tabs in Camera Mode lets you select from a series of different filter effects, and level of which they’re blended with the shot.
Some of these, especially at low blends, can be subtle amplifications of whatever shot you were going for—the Vapor filter at low levels is nicely paired with Spider-Verse costumes to create the exaggerated chromatic abberation effect from the movies, for example!—but others might get you to consider changing the lighting choices you made to get the most out of them. It’s always worth seeing if a certain filter will change your mind about a given shot.
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This is an obvious one, perhaps, but worth noting: you don’t always have to take pictures of Spider-Man, even when the game’s called Marvel’s Spider-Man 2. There’s no actual J. Jonah Jameson hovering around your shoulder. There are multiple scenes in the game where your perspective swaps to characters that aren’t Peter or Miles, either during the main story or in side missions, so take the opportunity to shoot a subject you don’t always get a chance to.
And even when you are playing as Peter or Miles? Turn off hero visibility in Camera Mode, or literally turn the camera away from them sometimes. Capturing anything from a fearsome foe to a lavish city vista is just as fun as taking a shot of your shiny superheroes.
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Source: Gizmodo