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Your blurry areas start and stop pretty brutally, and also in a way that isn't perpendicular to the camera angle. That just doesn't look very good.

Try having a progressive blur on a horizontal scale, it'll work much better.

http://mashable.com/2013/09/24/photoshop-tilt-shift/

there's a lot of tutorials online

on mobile you can try with Snapseed (android) (iOS)

I used this tutorial: http://mashable.com/2013/09/24/photoshop-tilt-shift/

However, what it does not tell you is that you can cut out of your masked selection with the lasso tool to create a focus on one object, like you can see in the windmill and Washington Monument images. (Those were my last two images, when I learned that I can do that)

Here are some other shots of it...

https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/temple-on-lake-surrounded-by-giant-2166588

https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/samutparkanthailand-nov-28-2010-big-fish-542781913

These are all from Wikimedia Commons and licensed CC BY-SA. I've had them in a wallpaper rotation on my computer for a little while and thought I'd post them here. They aren't "standard" wallpaper sizes but they still look pretty cool.

Basically the blur effect that is common here tries to simulate one of the things that a tilt lens can do, which is to make it appear as though the depth of field is very narrow, which tricks your brain into thinking its a macro shot. To do it in editing you just add a lot of blur before and after the subject. To do it with a tilt lens, you tilt it so the focus plane intersects with the subject and as little else in the image as possible. However, with a tilt lens you could also tilt it so that more of the image would be in focus than normal

When it tilts it rotates the focus plane according to the scheimpflug principle
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheimpflug_principle Here's my visualisation which might help https://www.geogebra.org/classic/xs64kyhm

But really the big advantage is that it forces me to think when taking photos and it's a lot more fun

You can use Snapseed for editing photos or the Tilt-Shift Camera app to adjust effects before taking the photo.

"In camera" tilt-shift is usually just a fancy Gaussian blur mask applied after the photo is take and does not care about your composition. By hand, you can do a much better job adjusting the shape and magnitude of your masks. With a lens (admittedly expensive, see this Nikon mount 24mm f/3.5 tilt-shift lens is over 600 bucks) the physics takes care of focusing. It's actually really neat to experiment/play with!

I'll bookend this comment by noting I do appreciate even simple photographic effects when they're applied in well thought out ways (this does not apply to the overused classic Instagram filters).