The gradual blurring, or the coloring?
The blurring could be done using the "Lens Blur" feature found in Photoshop CS and CS2 - it would just be a matter of creating a depth channel in your channels palette. For a quick tutorial on it, try this tutorial:
http://www.jonbalza.com/tutorials/ph.../gradientblur/
(Yeah, I know... sorry about the personal promotion.)
As to the colors - theres a few ways to do it. You could go with a gradient map with black/maroon/white, or you could do a duotone. (Convert to greyscale, then convert to duotone, and choose black/maroon.)