I respectfully disagree. If this image were grainless and tack sharp it would be reduced to sterile photo reportage and the sense of tension and mystery would evaporate to a large extent. The murky quality actually adds to the image, I think.
Rand
As I mentioned before, there's no accounting for taste.
However, a relevant point I would make is that a technically sharp and noise-free image can be degraded as much as you like during post processing, to accord with your taste. The reverse is much more difficult.
Whilst a noisy and unsharp image can certainly be improved, for the benefit of those who do not find noise and blurriness a big attraction, most of us would agree that it's difficult to create detail that was never captured in the first instance.
A few years ago I visited an Henri Cartier Bresson exhibition in Australia. I certainly found the photos interesting, but I could not restrain myself, as I walked around the exhibition hall, from making a mental comparison with what I imagined each photo could have been like if it had been taken with a modern DSLR, and processed by me.
How much better each photo would then have been.
When I came to this shot of a man jumping over a puddle, what struck me was not any appeal due to murkiness, but the symmetry and the relationships between various elements in the composition.
Previously, I'd seen only rather small images of this shot on my computer screen, no bigger than the current image from Jeremy. On the fairly large print presented in the exhibition (maybe 20" x 25" - can't remember precisely), the background advertisement of the Railowsky Circus, depicting another person in the act of 'jumping', was much clearer, and therefore the connection or relationship, in the composition, between the picture of the jumping man in the advertisement and the real man jumping the puddle, both with their own reflections in the water, was stronger and more obvious, and as a consequence that increased the appeal of the photo.
This image is truly a great example of 'capturing the moment'. Grain, noise and general lack of clarity do not add to its appeal one whit, in my view.