Anyone find this background distracting?

It was there and it's not going away. This was a Festival of Arts celebration and that was the background from that side of the street.

The middle of the street had a jungle jumping mammoth air thing for the kiddies. That background was even worse.

This is what fast lenses on a dSLR are for.

Well, now that you mention it.

I think you could knock it down enough in PS. The dancer is extremely well lit.

Maybe dim it down and blur it out a tad. Lose the colored lanterns.

Maybe lose the pole in the first one then. No one will notice that the wire is floating.....

Um, that's actually a bit worse than the first image. If you gave me a choice between the two, I'd take the first, no offense.

As for how I'd do this, I'd probably duplicate the layer that has the original layer, add a gaussian or motion blur, set it to whatever intensity you want it at, then apply a mask to that layer. Invert that mask, and paint with white to reveal the blur, black to hide whatever mistakes you made in your painting, and you should be ok. You can also increase/decrease the opacity of the layer to help it look more natural.

What background? Oh, I see...

The dancer is so pretty that I didn't even notice the background until you mentioned it.
I like the original photos much more. Besides, there is nothing you can do about he background in a photo taken in the street among people.

maybe make the balloons a seperate layer and desaturate the color. Should be able to clone out the wire easy enough, as well as the pole. I might take a stab at it tomorrow if i have time.

The edit is far, far worse.

Clone tool in Photoshop. A little bit of sharpening added to the woman.

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Randy, I like Stanics effort. I think he's on the right track.

I could have kept going.. blur the background and/or make it monochrome or something, but I just wanted to show how a couple tooks in photoshop can be relatively fast and easy. I didn't want to do to much to a 591 x 800 image.. lol

Now that i look at it again, getting rid of that damn white line on the road by her feet would have made a big difference and taken like 2seconds to do.