A Face In The Crowd

[Wanderer]

[Chrissie]

As an ambitious layman, who is neither an expert nor a professional at photography, I feel a little uneasy about this one. To me it seems just a tick too obvious, that you applied at random a mask to sharpen your #1, and at the same time (or in a separate step) blurred the backdrop.

It doesn't come across as believable, in my eyes.

 

Edit:

Thought about this a little longer: looking at the relative sizes of the faces involved (in terms of screen area [pixels] covered), this slight difference in area covered by each face, implying only a slight difference in distance from the camera, just doesn't seem to justify the rather huge difference in sharpness. That's what makes it "wrong", in my eyes.

[LiveShots]

That looks like normal bokeh from a wide open telephoto lens… 

[Wanderer]

It was a Batis 85 1.8 on a Sony a6000 (an APS-C Camera) so quite a bit of telephoto effect. Really just a straight shot out of the camera with slight ton and sharpening adjustment in post processing. In fact (unfortunately) I wouldn't know how to do the stuff you describe. 

[MDJAK]

It was a Batis 85 1.8 on a Sony a6000 (an APS-C Camera) so quite a bit of telephoto effect. Really just a straight shot out of the camera with slight ton and sharpening adjustment in post processing. In fact (unfortunately) I wouldn't know how to do the stuff you describe.

 

Nice shot. And unfortunately your last sentence describes me to a T. I too wouldn’t know how to do that in PS