Focal point
The one spot the eye lands on first. Everything else in the frame either points at it or steals from it.
See it
What it is
The focal point is the spot the eye lands on first and keeps returning to. It is not decided by what you meant to shoot, it is decided by contrast: the brightest area, the sharpest area, the one saturated color in a muted frame, the biggest shape, the place lines converge. Faces and eyes beat all of it, and text in frame beats even those.
Give every image exactly one. The usual tools are shallow depth of field to strip everything else soft, a pool of light on the subject, separation from the background, and leading lines that point. If two candidates are equally loud the eye ping-pongs between them and the shot reads as busy without anyone knowing why.
Gotcha: this is not the camera's focus point. Autofocus decides what is sharp; the focal point is where attention goes, and a blown-out window or a stray white sneaker in the corner will happily steal it from your perfectly focused subject. Squint at the image: whatever survives as a blob is your real focal point.
Ask AI for it
Build the image around a single clear focal point: put the subject's face in the brightest, sharpest part of the frame, drop the background two stops darker and throw it out of focus, and keep every other object low in contrast and desaturated. No competing bright areas, no blown highlights at the edges, nothing else sharp.