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.

For the purposes here, we’re going to focus on casting a strong abstract bokeh effect on everything in an image that is shot with the iPhone, rather than just the background elements as you’d commonly find in macro photography and portraits.

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.

The example images below demonstrate this trick while shooting a tree in directly sunlight. You’ll notice the initial exposure isn’t that great, it’s the HDR photo that captures the full bokeh effect we’re aiming for here with better color reproduction.

Initial default exposure with bokeh but overexposed:

The better HDR photo with strong bokeh:

It may take you a few times to get it down, but it’s very easy once you figure out the proper exposure for the subject. I’m not much of a photographer but get creative and you’ll almost certainly create better pictures than the samples shown here.

Capturing Bokeh at Night & with Dark Lighting

Shooting bokeh on the iPhone is a lot easier at night or in dark lighting, and it’s great for capturing city lights or night scenes in an abstract way. The basics are similar to getting bokeh in daylight, though the HDR aspect is less significant:

• Open Camera app and tap-and-hold for Focus Lock onto any object away from the lighting source you want to shoot


• With Focus Lock enabled, aim at your subject and shoot the picture while holding fairly steady – do note the bokeh will compensate for some jitteriness of the lens

We’ll review some user submitted photos for this one (thanks Elizabeth!), which demonstrates the bokeh effect at night when taking a picture of a distant street from a rooftop. Here’s the initial exposure, notice the screenshot is blurred because the iPhone isn’t that great at taking night photos – but we’ll use that to our advantage here – the focus lock is being set on a random dark area of the screen:

Here’s the final shot of that same road, with a good bokeh blur captured in the image:

I takes advantage of the iPhones inability to shoot great photos at night, and instead you end up with a pretty nice bokeh effect.

The focus locking technique tends to work best in low lighting situations, particularly at night.

Thanks to Elizabeth for providing the tip idea and night picture

Capturing Strong Bokeh Effects with an iPhone & Olloclip

If the focus lock bokeh trick isn’t enough for you and you want more professional quality pictures, you’ll need to step it up and get a third party lens for the iPhone. The Olloclip is our lens of choice for this purpose, it includes three lenses: a macro lens, a wide-angle lens, and a fish eye lens. For the purposes of creating very strong bokeh, you’ll want to use the macro lens.

If interested, you can get an Olloclip detachable lens from Amazon at a fairly sizable discount.

• Attach the Olloclip onto the iPhone camera with the macro lens


• Point at any far away, well-lit object to immediately see very strong bokeh and take the picture

With the Olloclip trick, you don’t even need to focus or anything, because the macro lens and it’s focal length force everything to blur that’s at a distance.

Here’s a shot of a tree with the Olloclip macro lens attached, the strong bokeh is very obvious:

I’m not much of a photographer but the Instagram blog shows us this bokeh photo taken with an Olloclip, demonstrating the before and after of shooting christmas lights to get the effect:

Got any other tips for shooting bokeh with an iPhone? Let us know in the comments. Have fun, experiment, and enjoy your iPhone photography!

Many apps for both iOS and OS X store documents and app data directly in iCloud, this allows easy syncing between devices and also provides a certain extra level of backup for some apps, since it’s all stored in the cloud. On the other hand, you may want to remove some of those documents and app data from iCloud, and that’s what we’ll show you how to do easily directly from Mac OS X. This is done through the iCloud preference panel similar to how you can manage and delete iCloud backups for iOS devices from OS X, though obviously rather than deleting a device backup it’ll only be application data or specific documents that is being removed.

Deleting App Data from iCloud through OS X

• Open System Preferences from the  Apple menu and choose “iCloud”


• Click “Manage”


• Select the app to delete iCloud data from


• Choose “Delete All” to remove all app data for that application (if app is cross-platform, it will delete app data for both OS X and iOS)

Once confirmed, the documents and app data are removed completely from iCloud and all of your iOS & OS X devices, a process which can’t be undone.

Delete Specific Documents from iCloud via Mac OS X

You’ll find that specific iCloud documents for certain apps will also be stored here in the iCloud manager panel. For example, you can directly manage individual documents from apps like TextEdit, and delete them on a per-document basis:

• Choose a specific app (e.g. TextEdit)


• Select the specific document name to delete and choose “Delete”, confirm the document removal

You will find both iOS and OS X app data in the iCloud manager control panel, and if you’re thinking about deleting documents from iCloud this way you may want to copy them to your hard drive first because the removal is completely permanent. You can do that either by opening the document in question and then resaving it locally, or by accessing the iCloud documents directly from the Finder and copying them to elsewhere in Mac OS X.

In either case, you can’t select all, so if you’re looking to delete every single thing from iCloud this way you’ll need to manually select each app and delete according to the methods above.

If you’re deleting data to try and free up space in iCloud, you may want to consider just upgrading to a larger iCloud plan by choosing “Change Storage Plan…”, the default of 5GB is quite small and runs out quickly, you’ll find it’s often barely adequate for backing up a single iOS device, once you add a Mac or two, an iPhone, and an iPad, you’ll consistently be running out of iCloud storage for both app data and backups. Sure you can start backing up locally instead, but ideally, Apple would provide 5GB of iCloud storage per device rather than per Apple ID, but thus far they haven’t changed their capacity offerings to be that way.

You can quickly access AirPlay streaming right from the lock screen of any iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. The only requirement is that you have some form of audio (or video) playing with the lock screen active, and that can be playing from a default app like Music or from something like Pandora or Spotify.

• Start playing audio from any app (Music, Pandora, Spotify, Rdio, etc)


• Double-tap the Home button to summon the lock screen controls


• Tap the AirPlay button and choose the receiver to send the stream

This is much faster than the multitasking bar approach since it works directly from the lock screen and you don’t need to be in a specific app to activate it either. In fact, some apps that don’t directly support AirPlay will still be able to stream their output by using this lock screen trick, try it by starting music in such an app, then locking the screen, and then using the double-tap method to choose an AirPlay receiver.

AirPlay Button Not Visible on the Lock Screen?

You must have an eligible AirPlay receiver within range for the AirPlay button to be visible on the lock screen. Also, you’ll need to be on an AirPlay supported iOS version (5.1 or newer).

An Apple TV will of course serve as a receiver, but if you don’t have one you’re not out of luck because there are plenty of software-based AirPlay receiver apps too that will work to send the music stream to. Reflector (free to try) and XBMC (free always) are our personal favorites and they are cross-platform compatible, meaning you can run them on a Mac OS X machine, a Windows PC, and with the case of XBMC, even a Linux box or modded Xbox. If the button does not show up and you have those apps running and configured properly for AirPlay support, it’s possible they just haven’t refreshed yet, so try double-tapping the Home button again to hide and then again to show the lock screen controls

We all know that Apple products are quite popular around the world, but would you ever have guessed that the North Korean “Supreme Leader” Kim Jong Un is a Mac user? Well, he is, and in a recently released press photo from the North Korean state media you can see Kim Jong Un sitting at his desk reviewing plans to nuke America – yes, seriously that is the theme of the photo set – alongside a 21.5″ iMac. Specifically, the iMac is prior generation model with a side-loading SuperDrive, not the recent super-sleek thin revision, and NKNews says the photo can be “confirming long-held rumors of the Kim family’s passion for Apple Macs.”

Quite peculiar, indeed. Though perhaps it shouldn’t be too shocking considering that Kim Jong Un’s legendary father, Kim Jong Il, also had a favorite computer from our favorite fruit company too, and that was a MacBook Pro 15″.

Anyway… it’s Friday, so uh, yea, most interesting Mac setup post ever maybe?