This isn’t one of my photos (I just wrote the article). My guess is that they used “natural” light (the light coming from the room bulbs) and just pushed the ISO higher to make more “noisy “ and also maybe focused it more on the rear elements of the frame to give the people are more fuzzy look. Just my two cents.
Discussion
Awesome, thanks for your insight on this. Would love to see more of your photography posted on here. Would you have lit and set up this scene any different than they have?
I probably would have set up some remote flashed and cranked up the aperture to get as much of the frame in focus as possible. The subjects in this photo are considerably “softer” that the background than I prefer.