Camera shake recoil in FPS

n Shootergame and Unreal Tournament, ClientPlayCameraShake is called when firing a weapon to simulate recoil. One problem with this is camera shakes always want to return to the starting position. As a result when holding down the trigger, UT and SG just shake the camera back and forth, while most FPS games shake while looking up over time, which is what we want to do.

The easy thing to do would be to just lerp the camera to look up over time in addition to the shake effect, but I am wondering if there is a better and more natural solution? Can we cut the camera shake short to not return to start? Are we going about this the wrong way completely?

Thanks!