Primary and Secondary Sources

Reference images are part and parcel of working in an artistic design role. They are a necessary part of creating a believable world. There are two kinds of sources: Primary and Secondary.

Secondary sources are images obtained second hand. Nowadays this is mostly finding pictures from the internet. 

Primary sources involve obtaining the references yourself, and so getting information first hand.

Obviously there are advantages and disadvantages both ways. Primary sources are limited to what you have available but do allow you to find exactly what it is you want and also that you can examine it at any angle. Furthermore, resolution of an image won’t be a worry since you can ensure that the resolution is always adequate. Secondary sources have all these problems: sometimes it’s difficult to find exactly what you’re looking for, you only get the view angle that the image provides and quite often the resolution and/or quality of the image is sub-par. However, they do have the advantage of being more encompassing of… well, everything.
The final decision from these considerations differ on the person looking for reference images and their situation. Students, like me, are encouraged to use source our own images for reference but quite often the things we have available to us are limited, whether by money or circumstance. Therefore, whenever creating less mundane things I would most likely use secondary sources. Big Triple-A companies, however, have much more resources and access. They are much more likely to source their images themselves, although the artists still likely use the internet as a source frequently, just perhaps less so than someone in my situation.

For example, a video game set in France. For someone in my circumstance, Google would contribute greatly to helping me get the visuals look right. I could get an image of the Eiffel Tower easily enough and that would probably be more than adequate for me to use. But getting images of the little streets, the insides of the buildings, the signposts, bins, the general layouts of towns, the scale of everything... All of these things and more would be difficult to get good references for from Google. Secondary sources can be useful but aren't specific enough for me to get everything I’d want.

Easy enough to find this

Now, the same example but for a Triple-A studio. They could pay for a small team of people, maybe 2 or 3 to fly to France and stay for a while, taking extensive photographs of many different things from as many angles as possible. When they got home, they would have a veritable treasure trove of imagery from which to base the designs off of. Their designs can then be more detailed and more accurate and also more specific to the real place.