Thanks!
I wanted there to be some way to get that concept of "Oh, the perfect shot" that you could convey in a visual game, so there had to be a bonus involved with especially striking image subjects. And if you're a photojournalist, your goal would be to get your photos seen by the world so the score stands in for that. And it's also a measure of the player's integrity, so it goes down if they allow themselves to be censored or if they don't help others.
Then there's actually two "lifebars" in the game, because you're potentially screwed if you run out of flashes but literally game over if you run out of location cards before escaping.