True enough. I know in college I spent a buttload of my free time scouring the pre-Flickr internet for reference pictures and scouring books of cities and cool buildings from the library (I used a lot of Japanese books so there'd be little overlap with what anyone else was doing). But putting it on paper is a trick because if you don't do it right, it'll feel like your characters aren't interacting with your background-- it'll look like bad greenscreen. And you want to avoid that moment of recognition ("oh, they're in the same room that they shot so-and-so in") unless you're actually going for that. I do save some places for that intentional recognition.
The problem with all of this is that it's a luxury most monthly artists don't seem to have, and it's why I slowly gave up on my dream of being a comic book artist first and foremost.
A photo I took once actually did get used as reference for a piece of artwork, it was a very pleasant surprise (and I was credited)