Editorial standards · Document 04

How we picture mad honey

Most images attached to this subject are wrong in the same three ways: the honey is orange, the bee is the wrong species, and the cliff is somebody else's mountain. This page sets out what we photograph, what we refuse to photograph, how it is graded, who owns it, and what we write underneath it. It is the brief we send to commissioned photographers, published in full so readers can check our work against it.

Owner: Anouk Devi, picture editor. Version 3.1, in force since 14 May 2026. Reviewed annually.

A honey hunter stands on a rope ladder against a grey cliff face, a dark honeycomb hanging on the rock above him. — **Why this picture?** It shows the working conditions and the physical scale that every article in Culture depends on, and it does it without a posed hero portrait. Shot from an opposing ledge at roughly 100mm so the compression reads the height honestly; the subject is the scale of the cliff, not the man’s face. Commissioned, Nuwakot district, April 2026. Photograph by Prakash Rai for Mad Honey Review.

1 · The three image families

Every picture on this site belongs to one of three families, and the family determines the treatment. Mixing them — a macro shot lit like reportage, a diagram drawn like an illustration — is the fastest way to make a reference publication look like a brochure. A page can carry all three, but each image is unambiguously one of them.

Family A · Documentary: hunting, place and people

Available light, reportage discipline, nothing arranged for the camera. These pictures carry the Culture and History sections and they are the only images on the site that show people . They are commissioned, never licensed from a stock library, because the stock version of this subject is almost always mislabelled or staged.

Two men crouch at the base of a cliff binding green foliage into a smoking bundle. — Waist-level, 35mm, ambient only; let the smoke blow through the frame rather than waiting for a clean gap. Hands and rope in focus, faces incidental. **Runs on:** Mad Honey Hunting, The Gurung Honey Hunters.

Metal and plastic containers stand on a stone step outside a hill house at dusk. — 28mm, standing height, shot into flat late light. Keep the whole slope in frame so the reader can place the altitude. **Runs on:** Mad Honey in Nepal, Mad Honey Harvesting.

Family B · Studio and macro: honey, comb and material

Controlled light, neutral ground, no props that imply a kitchen or a gift shop. This family carries Basics, Comparisons and Guides. The single hardest requirement is colour honesty: the reason readers ask about “red mad honey” at all is colour, so a picture that has been warmed in post is not a picture, it is an assertion we cannot support.

Three glass jars of honey photographed against a lit white background showing three distinct shades. — Copy-stand, single diffused backlight, colour target shot in the first frame and left in the raw. No gradient, no shadow styling.

Close view of dark irregular honeycomb cells with uneven wax walls. — 100mm macro at f/11, focus-stacked to 14 frames, raking light from one side to raise the wax texture.

A printed laboratory report on a desk with one result row visible and identifying details covered. — Overhead, soft north window light, no colour grade. **Mask identifiers in-camera with a paper strip, never in post.**

Family C · Analytical illustration: mechanism, data and geography

Drawn, not photographed, and always drawn by us. Anything that explains a mechanism, plots a number or shows a distribution is illustration , because a photograph cannot honestly carry that information and photographs pressed into that job become decoration.

Diagram of a sodium channel showing grayanotoxin bound at the receptor site, holding the channel open. — Flat vector, no perspective, no gradients. One signal colour only, everything else ink. **Runs on:** Grayanotoxin Explained, Grayanotoxin Effects.

Map showing rhododendron distribution across the Himalayan arc and the eastern Black Sea coast. — Terrain implied by contour hatching only, no political fill. Two areas shaded in the single signal colour at 18% and 40%.

2 · The grading rule

The house grade is: expose for the highlight, hold neutral white, and stop. We shoot to a colour target, correct to it, and accept the result even when the result is duller than the version an advertiser would run. Contrast curves stay gentle; we would rather show detail in a shadow than sell a mood.

The grade in five lines

Skin tone is not a mood control

Skin tone is checked against the target on every documentary frame before publication. Warming an image of a person to make a scene feel “Himalayan” is a form of misrepresentation and it is not permitted here under any deadline pressure.

DO — these three pass

Do

A plain glass of honey on a wooden table in daylight, brownish-amber in colour.

Passes because the colour is measurable and repeatable. A reader comparing their own jar to this one is being given usable information. Neutral white balance from target, no grade.

Do

Hands cut into a dark honeycomb with a short curved blade.

Passes because it shows the labour without turning a working person into a decorative figure. 50mm, overcast light, no fill, no skin smoothing.

Do

A large dark honeybee standing on comb, its abdominal banding visible.

Passes because the species is verified by an entomologist before filing. Bee pictures are the single most common error in this subject.

DO NOT — these three are rejected, and the cliché each one is

Reject

Cliché: the dipper. It is a product shot for a supermarket brand. It says nothing about this honey and it is orange because a filter made it orange.

Reject

Cliché: the heroic silhouette. It erases the person, invents a light that was not there, and turns dangerous work into an aesthetic.

Reject

Cliché: the wrong species. Wrong bee, wrong continent, wrong plant. If we cannot verify the species, we run an illustration instead.

3 · Also rejected on sight

No frame implies consumption or quantity

4 · Sourcing, rights and consent

We commission most of what you see, license a narrow band of it, and refuse a specific list outright. The list is short and it is absolute; there is no deadline under which an editor may make an exception, and the picture desk holds the veto rather than the section editor .

Sourcing routes, what goes through each, and the terms held
Route	What goes through it	Terms we hold
Commissioned	All documentary work, all studio and macro work, all portraits. Photographers are briefed from this page and paid a day rate plus expenses, never per published frame.	Worldwide, perpetual, non-exclusive web licence. Photographer keeps copyright and may resell elsewhere.
Licensed	Historical material, museum and archive scans, and a small number of scientific micrographs we cannot produce ourselves.	Named licence recorded per file; expiry tracked and the file auto-flags 60 days out.
Public domain	Pre-1900 botanical plates and manuscript pages used in History.	Provenance URL stored with the file. Source institution credited in full even where not legally required.
Made in-house	Every diagram, chart and map. No exceptions — we do not license explanatory graphics.	Ours. Released for reuse under a named open licence on request.

Never used, under any circumstances

Consent when photographing hunters and communities

Consent is obtained before the camera comes out , in the subject’s own language, through a local interpreter who is paid for that work. We explain that the pictures will appear on a public website read internationally, that we cannot recall them once published, and that saying no costs the subject nothing.

5 · Credit and caption format

Every published image carries a caption, and every caption carries a credit. A caption states what is in the frame and, where the image is doing evidential work, what it is being used to show. It never repeats the headline and never editorialises beyond what the frame supports.

Caption rules

6 · Alt-text policy

Alt text describes the picture to someone who cannot see it. It is not a caption, not a keyword bin, and not a place to restate the paragraph beside it. Write what a sighted reader gets from the frame in one sentence, in plain language, without “image of”. Purely decorative images take an empty alt attribute — but on this site almost nothing is decorative, so an empty alt needs a reason.

Example 1 · a documentary frame

Badmad honey nepal himalayan honey hunter cliff bee harvest photo

A keyword string. It tells a screen-reader user nothing about what is in the frame and it reads aloud as noise.

GoodA man stands on a rope ladder halfway up a grey cliff, with a dark honeycomb on the rock above him.

Example 2 · the three-jar comparison

BadImage showing that colour varies between batches because grayanotoxin content differs.

Smuggles in a claim the photograph does not prove. Alt text describes; the body text argues.

GoodThree jars of honey side by side, the left pale gold, the middle amber, the right dark reddish-brown.

Example 3 · the sodium-channel diagram

BadDiagram

A one-word alt on an explanatory graphic hides the whole point of the graphic. Diagrams carry the longest alt text on the site.

Good

Cross-section of a cell membrane channel, with the toxin marked at a binding site on the channel wall and the channel drawn in its open state.

Length and edge cases

7 · Technical specification

Pictures are the largest thing we ship. The budget below is not aspirational — the build fails CI if a published image exceeds it. Art direction is per breakpoint: we crop for the phone rather than letting a 21:9 landscape shrink to a letterbox strip nobody can read.

Technical specification for delivered and published images
Item	Specification
Source delivery	Minimum 4000px on the long edge, 16-bit TIFF or original RAW plus a flat TIFF. sRGB for delivery, ProPhoto retained in the archive master. No sharpening applied by the photographer.
Art-directed crops	Three named crops per image, marked by the picture desk and not by an automatic focal-point algorithm: wide 21:9 for leads, standard 16:9 or 4:3 for in-body, portrait 3:4 for the 390px lead slot. Cards use 4:3 at every width.
Formats	AVIF first, WebP second, JPEG (quality 78, progressive) as the final fallback, served through `<picture>` with explicit `type` attributes. No format sniffing on the server.
Widths generated	390, 640, 828, 1180, 1600, 2360. `sizes` is written by hand per slot — never `100vw` on a slot that is 720px at most.
LQIP	A 24px-wide AVIF inlined as a data URI, blurred by CSS, swapped on decode. Average payload 380 bytes. No dominant-colour blocks; no spinners.
Lazy-loading	Everything is `loading="lazy"` except the single article lead, which is `loading="eager"` with `fetchpriority="high"` and a `<link rel="preload">`. Exactly one eager image per page — a second one is a build error.
Layout stability	Intrinsic `width` and `height` on every image, plus a CSS `aspect-ratio` on the container. Target CLS from images: zero.
Decoding	`decoding="async"` everywhere. Diagrams that are inline SVG bypass this entirely.

Scroll the table sideways for the full specification.

Per-image weight budget, AVIF at the width served

Per-image weight budget by slot
Slot	Served width	Budget	Hard ceiling	Notes
Article lead, desktop	1600px	120 KB	180 KB	The only eager image. Counted against LCP.
Article lead, mobile	828px	70 KB	110 KB	Portrait 3:4 crop, separately art-directed.
In-body 16:9	1180px	85 KB	130 KB	Lazy. Typically two to four per article.
Card 4:3	640px	40 KB	60 KB	Lazy. The most-repeated slot on the site.
Photo-essay full-bleed	2360px	180 KB	260 KB	The one slot allowed to be expensive, and only in Culture.
Author portrait	152px	8 KB	14 KB	1:1. Cached across the whole site.
Diagram (SVG)	—	24 KB	40 KB	Inline SVG, gzipped, with live text. Not a raster at any size.

8 · Illustration style

Drawing rules for Family C

Commission and rights requests

Photographers and illustrators: this page is the brief. If you have been sent this URL, the contributor pack in the rail has the release forms and the illustration grid. Rights and reprint enquiries go to the picture desk, not to the section editors.