So far in this series, I've talked about compositional elements, their weights and how to use their properties to balance the composition by imagining a balance of torques around the middle axis of an image. I also discussed balancing of negative space. But even all this doesn't give us a full picture of the factors that should affect compositional arrangement. This time, I intend to talk about another placement consideration which has a lot of impact on my own compositions: lead room.Lead room is the space in the direction a subject is facing. It is mostly used in portrait photography, but I claim that it's also extremely useful in landscape photography. That said, whereas in portraiture it's clear where this direction is, it's sometimes not as clear for non-living elements.n the exact same manner as in portrait photography, the human eye wants to know what's going on in the direction a subject is facing. The lack of space in that direction may thus cause the composition to be tense and unbalanced. It's the exact same with landscapes: when a subject appears to be facing some direction, we usually need to give it more space in that direction.
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