the results are in for bokeh, and I have only a couple notes:
1) the votes were spread all around; beck, Jackie & Faldage each collected two(2) votes
2) Candy: you did get your own vote – well done!
3) I’d like to thank Bran for voting for my very weak effort.
4) I got a complaint from someone who expected to have two weeks(!) to enter. after all this time, someone got tripped up by a ‘sennight’ – and it was a veteran of the game! heh heh.

The person who sent me this word said he was familiar with the concept, but hadn’t known there was a word for it. I didn’t know that camera lenses were rated on their out-of-focus quality, but then I don’t know much about lenses.

here then is how the voting went down:

a) a spidery, wrought-iron storage device used by north African nomads to keep their cooking vessels off the ground when not in use [crafted by beck123] chosen by olly, Jackie

b) a form of massage based on the shiatsu style from Japan [Candy] Candy

c) repr. a vulgar pronunciation of bouquet /bəʊ 'keɪ/ [tsuwm] BranShea

d) a practice fight in which the warriors are allowed only to use bokken as a weapon against each other; originally from Japanese [bexter] Faldage

e) the handhold on a camel saddle [Jackie] Coffeebean, beck123

f) a dance found at weddings in the rural areas of Morocco [Luke] Avy

g) a Japanese term used to describe the out of focus quality of a lens [Nikonians Photo Glossary] bexter

h) a South African man or woman possessing or being accused of possessing malignant witchcraft [BranShea] wofa

i) a short knife used by Andaman Island pygmies to carve the embouchure and finger holes of the bamboo flutes they use in ceremonial music [Faldage] Buffalo, Luke

j) a studious pupil, generally at a religious Jewish day school [wofa]

k) a retired South African rugby player who has immigrated to Canada [olly]
___

thanx for playing hogwash®!

I'm sorry guys BUT I really voted for D
I loved D as answer....by some glitch I must typed the wrong letter....lucky it was mine..my one I am taking the vote away from...didn't anyone think it was ambiguous?...me saying what I said..about wooden swords then voting something different

Can you edit the results tsuwim, please.

And, as if to shatter some expectations, one of the armils was the correct answer!

Always happy to be reminded of the charming and challenging bulldozer Hyacinth Bouquet in "Keeping up Appearences". Hence me choosing this obviously fake one.
It may be Japanese, it still sounds Afrikaans to me. Bokje, Bokkie.
+ thanks for the round.

Candy, I'm going to quote from the Hogwash Rules here, which I haven't had the chance to do for some time: scoring, such as it is with points not mattering, is virtually at the whim of the moderator/hogmaster® [see latest round, e.g.]. whinging to the hogmaster, while encouraged, has been shown to be completely ineffectual.

the operative words here being points not mattering and whinging.. completely ineffectual. so, not wanting to set any bad precedents (or bad presidents either), and you having made your intents clear to one and all... the ruling on the field stands.



(yes, it's quite obvious that I took you literally here, but not literally so. : )

Pygmies on the Andamans? Loved it: thaks Faldage. (Never
saw any in the Nat Geo films or books on the Andamans. Sort
of like Hobbits on the isle of Flores.)

My poor lonely ineffectual joke stands stands lost in translation. Good round and wow who'da thought you could describe out of focusness as opposed to focusedness.
Having been a camera operator for a good 20 years I had never encountered the term and had only referred to the depth of field component of an image and not the surrounding external field. Cool.

Ah, olly your rugby player is enjoying his pension with the Canadians.

But how about the word itself?

Main Entry: bokeh
Part of Speech: n
Definition: a Japanese term for the subjective aesthetic quality of out-of-focus areas of a photographic image
Example: The bokeh, or quality of the blurred image in the photograph, was described and discussed.

How come you good English speakers haven't found a decent English word for this part of speech? It is what in other visual arts is called 'rest form'? The counterparts in a composition? The left open spaces of a sculpture?

Or the Negative space.

Yes, that's what I mean. Thanks.

That's how English has always worked - we just did find a good word: bokeh!

Good round, ladies and gentlemen, and thanks to the hogmaster.

They're more often referred to as Negritos, but, yeah, they're there.

I stand educated. Thank you verymuch.

Roolz is Roolz

and I accept its my fault.

It was a great find tsuwm.

With Photoshop and the like programs you can apply a gradient mask to get a 'Lens Blur' effect which gives an image a depth of field effect.

My poor lonely ineffectual joke ?? Bloke, eh?

In photography, bokeh (pronounced /boʊˈkeɪ/) is the blur, or the aesthetic quality of the blur, in out-of-focus areas of an image, or "the way the lens renders out-of-focus points of light." Differences in lens aberrations and aperture shape cause some lens designs to blur the image in a way that is pleasing to the eye, while others produce blurring that is unpleasant or distracting—"good" and "bad" bokeh, respectively. Bokeh occurs for parts of the scene that lie outside the depth of field. Photographers sometimes deliberately use a shallow focus technique to create images with prominent out-of-focus regions. -wiki

so bokeh is not the same as depth-of-field, but rather the (subjective) quality of the out-of-focus region.

Yes...I understand that, but with photoshop, this effect can be manipulated and change the way we view a picture or subject by shifting the focal point. Call it faux bokeh.

This photo was taken with camera
Sunflowers

This one normal photo.
Horse 1


Same photo altered by photoshop.
Horse 2

I prefer horse #1, keep the blurring.

Ha! I bet on the second horse. I find the softening of the background improves the whole. In the first one the horizontal line cuts very sharp through the horses head and unfortunately at the same level as the red leather band on the horses' nose, which makes the cut more obvious. (whatever you call that headstuff.)
The photoshopping improves the composition as a whole. Nice name 'obsidian dawn'. Nice horse too.

It is altogether called a headcollar, the individual piece which goes over the nose is called the noseband :-) (I can name each bit of it if you want :P )

Thank you for the language, sounds reasonable. I know more about compositions than about horses. But I find them beautiful creatures.

I think so too....and marvel that they allow us to ride them.

And your compositions are beautiful, as I've had the
privilege to witness.