For me this is simple. You have 2 ways to look at "IQ":
Technically, and aesthetically.
One should always strive to achieve high quality technically, but sometimes, that gets in the way of the aesthetic you want.
Obsessing over ultimate sharpness, and such things as "bokeh" can often get in the way of creativity, as you spend more time thinking about technique than what the image is trying to say. Just remember, that photographs taken as a creative endeavour should be communicating something... that's all photography is: visual communication. We're not talking just about fine art imagery here... I mean all imagery.
So to make an analogy based on communication... let's consider the spoken word.
So think of the technical aspects such as sharpness, focus accuracy, exposure etc as the accuracy of the spoken word... the pronunciation, grammar etc.
Think of the aesthetics as diction, and the actual meanings of the words spoken.
You can have someone with supremely beautiful spoken English, merely reading a laundry list. It would be perfectly read, but wouldn't communicate much of interest. The opposite is someone with a heavy regional accent and dialect reciting an extremely moving piece of poetry, where their "flaws" are entirely appropriate.
The trick is deciding what is more important.
I took this shot ages ago, and I still love it. I was stuck inside, ill... it had been raining for almost a week... I wanted to capture how I felt. so I took this.
CLICK FOR BIG
Technically flawed. Shot on ISO125 35mm film, underexposed by about 2 stops, horrible vignetting from a cheap kit lens, not very sharp, and almost cooked in ID11 at 40C for 2 minutes (didn't even bother timing it) and printed on grade 3 paper with nothing else done to it. Not even bothered retouching the scratches and dust on the film. This is a straight scan of the neg... no post processing. Even that black border is real (A filed back 35mm neg carrier) It speaks of my mood at the time though. All these were choices I made. If I'd taken this technically perfectly, it would have lost the tone of voice I wanted.
Don't obsess about it. Do what's right for the work you are producing. You need to know how to take technically perfect shots however before you can even think about arsing about with lowering quality... otherwise you're just relying on luck. You also have to have a reason for doing it, and you have to do it in order to communicate something to the viewer.
Sometimes, technically perfect, if being the sole reason and driver behind the image making process, just results in really emotionally un-involving images.
If it feels right, then it's right, and if pedants want to argue over your sharpness etc, let them. If you're taking the images for the right reasons, it's usually pretty obvious why you did what you did. It's always easy to spot a shot that was intentionally flawed to those that are just badly produced through ignorance and lack of knowledge.
The same goes fr post processing these days.... just have a damned good think about whether what you are doing is actually adding anything to meaning of the image. [PLEASE DON'T TRY TO BYPASS THE SWEAR FILTER] to "wow" factor or trying to dazzle people with eye candy. If it doesn't add to the reading of the image, then it's superficial [PLEASE DON'T TRY TO BYPASS THE SWEAR FILTER] and eye candy.
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, for me this is something i feel the need to understand to be a competent photographer, i am quite technically minded and like to learn new "stuff", but as i have said the term IQ is quite ambiguous and i felt i needed some explanation of peoples view of what it actually means to them.
thanks for the reply and the laugh, i was wondering what a pookeyhead was so googled it and as i say none seemed to describe you.
