Dynamic Camera Help

Well, I am trying to achieve the effect of fluid camera movement such as the game Dishonored. Examples being when you fall and hit the ground the camera smoothly drops relative to your velocity, and when climbing the camera sort of rocks back and forth.

How are these effects achieved?

The only things I have come up with are somehow utilizing the spring joint with the camera itself and pushing it around with a script, but I know nothing about that and it requires a rigidbody.

My only other idea was creating an empty gameobject at the minimum height and having a script make camera constantly slerp towards it's original position, and then do calculations getting the fall distance and push the camera down based on the distance, this might also work for each footstep you take. Is this a reasonable idea? Or is there some easier way of animating a camera?

Does anybody else have a better idea? I am not too experienced in programming so I can't come up with a reasonable way to do this.