How to make a bokeh lens filter

Bokeh is a photography effect that creates strong light blurs on any out of focus light, frequently rendered as circular blurry elements where a point of light is visible in the image. You’ll see it often in professional photography as well as more abstract artistically oriented photography, and it can help to create a depth of field and also add some very unique character to photos. But bokeh isn’t just for professionals with expensive lenses and DSLR cameras, you can get that same effect shooting with an iPhone as well. We’ll cover two easy ways to do it, one uses nothing but your iPhone, and the second uses the excellent third party lens attachment known as Olloclip.

Create Bokeh on the iPhone with Focus Lock

The simplest way to create bokeh effect on all lit elements of a picture are to utilize the iPhone cameras software focus lock feature. Keeping in mind that focus lock is also exposure lock – you can’t separate the two with the standard iOS camera, yet at least – you’ll want to focus lock on something that is roughly the same exposure, particularly when shooting in daylight. For shooting night photos, the exposure lock is less important, though the depth of field remains crucial.
Bokeh in Daylight

Shooting bokeh in the daylight can take some trial and error to get down, but it’s not particularly complicated once you try a few times. The gist of it is to lock onto something very close as if you were taking a macro photo, but then turn arrange the camera to shoot the subject instead, creating the bokeh:

Launch the Camera app
Find a close object of approximately the same exposure (brightness) as the subject you wish to shoot with bokeh
Place the iPhone camera roughly 3-8″ away from that object and tap and hold on the screen to focus lock on that object, you will know it’s active when “AE/AF Lock” appears on screen
With Focus Lock on, aim at the subject and take the picture to capture the bokeh effect

With the focus lock trick in daylight, it generally works best to have HDR photos enabled, because it’s often the HDR photo and not the standard image that has the most accurate reproduction of colors while still maintaining the strong bokeh blur that was desired.