One feature of Bioshock is its research camera, which does exactly what it says on the tin. At least, it would if it came in a tin, I think I just found it on the floor somewhere; anyway, it’s a camera, that you use to research the enemies you encounter. Hence the name. The natural, and sane, way of using it is to sneak around, hoping to catch some nice shots of Splicers in their natural habitat much like David Attenborough (were David Attenborough to be crawling around an undersea base toting various weapons and genetic modifications) (and were he to actually be a photographer, rather than wildlife presenter, but I couldn’t think of a suitably well known wildlife photographer offhand) (so maybe more like David Attenborough’s cameraman) (only with a still camera, rather than film) (which rather obviates the point of David Attenborough in the first place… I mean, just him standing in the foreground of photos pointing at stuff, not so much use really.) (Unless maybe you had some kind of audio recording to play along at the same time…) (An audio recording of David Attenborough talking about the photo, that is, an audio recording of Harry “The Hipster” Gibson singing “Who Put The Benzedrine In Mrs Murphy’s Ovaltine” wouldn’t be so appropriate).

What the hell was I talking about?

Oh yeah. The sane use of the camera, then, is to sneak around, snap your photos with a telephoto lens; you wouldn’t want to alert those nasty old Splicers, after all. When doing so, I can’t help but provide a voice-over, in suitably hushed whisper…
“And here we see the Leadhead Splicer, roaming the corridors…” *snap* “… notice the mad, staring eyes, and of course the pistol.”

So. That’s all well and good. However, the resulting photos are usually average at best, so you need lots of them to get the research bonuses. Much better for research purposes are nice, big close-ups. And better still, “action shots”, offering a further bonus. Of course, the type of action they’re talking about is combat (at least, I’m pretty sure that’s the main type of action. I’ve never found a pair of Splicers getting down to some… errr… “Splicing” to see if that counts as an “action shot”). This leads to an interesting technique I like to call the Combat Paparazzi, involving sprinting towards your target yelling “That’s it! Yeah, come on, swing that wrench at me, oh yeah, that’s lovely, yeah, bit more pistol now? Come on, just a bit of pistol, that’s beautiful, perfect, you’re a natural.”

Then you swap the camera for a shotgun, and shoot ’em in the head before they kill you.

Then take a photograph of the corpse (there’s a penalty for dead targets, but hey, research is research…)