Visual Weight

One area of the frame pulls harder than everything around it, and that is where the audience looks first. Weight is how a composition decides its own order of reading.

It works below the level of attention. A viewer does not notice that the brightest patch in the frame is a face, and they look at it anyway.

Weight comes mostly from contrast against the surroundings. A bright shape on a dark field is heavy, and so is a dark shape on a bright one. The difference does the work rather than the brightness itself.

Size, saturation and sharpness add to it. A large object outweighs a small one, a saturated colour outweighs a muted one, and the only sharp thing in a soft frame is heavy however small it is.

Name which one does the work. Deciding that the face is the brightest thing in the frame is a lighting instruction, and deciding it is the only sharp thing is a lens instruction.

Use it on any frame with more than one candidate for attention: a crowd, a cluttered room, a landscape with a figure in it.

Think about it less in a clean frame with one subject on a plain ground. There the weight is settled before you start.

Tonal contrast sets two things against each other so they define each other. Visual weight is about one thing winning. The first is a relationship and the second is a hierarchy.

Figure and ground is the related idea of separating a subject from its background. Weight goes further and ranks everything in the frame.

The frame comes back evenly lit and evenly sharp, so nothing leads. Name the heaviest element and say what makes it heavy: brightest, most saturated, only thing in focus.

The second failure is a competing bright patch, often a window or a lamp. Say the background stays down, or that the only bright area is the subject.