Why does shining a laser into an iPhone camera create these shapes? When I shine a laser light into an iPhone 6 camera I get these weird shapes: 

The shapes are in no way in the background behind the laser. What causes these to appear? I know about typical lense flare, but something interesting seems to be happenning with the light to creat those circular shapes with fine rings inside. 
 A: Just a guess, but those rings look to me like Haidinger fringes.  When monochromatic light falls on a thin, transparent plate or film, some of the light is transmitted and some gets reflected back, then reflected forward again, from the two surfaces.  The reflected light interferes with the transmitted light.  Whether the interference is constructive or destructive depends on how long the path of the reflected light is compared with the transmitted light, and so it's a function of viewing angle.  The result is concentric rings of alternating constructive and destructive interference.  In the case of this image, the surfaces doing the reflecting could be the front and back surfaces of the camera lens.
A: I can identify the "rings of a tree" as a typical Airy function corresponding to a diffraction on an edge. In this case the edge is circular, as is the aperture of your camera. 
You can best observe the same Airy-like "ringing" when you focus the laser and put some obstacle to the beam near the focus.
Multiple internal reflections in the lens can generate several different spots, like the light in a water droplet creates rainbows. But why they are not arranged in a single line? It is their azimuthal position that puzzles me the most.
A: I'll try my best to explain each part of the photo. 
Everything that's red in the photo should be from the laser itself. 
The nearly center white part of the photo comes from camera sensory overload. Lasers are extremely powerful concentrations of light, so when they directly hit the eye or an aperture they temporarily "blind" the source. In addition, because cameras tend to focus light to get an image, the effects of lasers can actually damage your camera. Here's more information. It's the same reason the sun looks white if you look directly at it and then why you can't see for 30 seconds afterwords.
The yellow part of the picture, is that color because it's not at the center of the laser. There's not enough overload to make it white, but there's to much to register it as red.
Overall this picture is best described by "Lens-Flare". Here's a wikipedia article on that.
