In The Practicing Photographer, photographer and teacher Ben Long shares a weekly serving of photographic instruction and inspiration. Each installment focuses on a photographic shooting scenario, a piece of gear, or a software technique. Each one concludes with a call to action designed to inspire you to pick up your camera (or your mouse or smartphone) to try the technique for yourself.

Note: Because this is an ongoing series, viewers will not receive a certificate of completion.

I've always hated this song. But digging through my old sheet music I found a midcentury piano treatment that made it much more melancholy and interesting, so I decided to give the tune a synthesizer treatment and marry it up to the vocals to see if I couldn't do some damage. Also my first attempt at using Ableton, sorry for any production missteps.

I live most of the year in a small, fairly self-contained village of about 8 people. We do use grid power where we can't get micro-hydro. There's not enough sun to make solar workable (we're in a valley). We all have wood stoves to heat and cook, big gardens, forage for food and medicine, and hunt and fish for meat as well as raise chickens and sheep. Our main needs from the outside world are salt, grains, cooking fats, sweeteners, tobacco, and tea/coffee. There is a large vegetable farm our friend owns up the road, and most of us work there during the summer and we get lots of free produce. We have neighbors we visit to harvest from their orchards and wild berries.

Being totally self-sufficient all on your own is honestly almost impossible unless you are willing to really, really rough it. The things you need depend on your climate, but outside of a few outlier 'lives in the woods by himself in a cave' folks, this is not easy to achieve.

So you need a house. Insulated from heat and cold. This means building a good shelter with air flow and heating. Wood burning stoves are a good solution. If you're in a 4 season climate, you will need between 2 and 4 cords of wood, (60 hours or so of chopping if you know what you're doing) which have to cure for a year before you can use them, even from dead standing. So chainsaw, axes, wedges, and probably a truck. Which means gas. This means money on an ongoing basis.

You need water. A well or a spring, or a creek close enough to the source to not need filtering. This all means pipes or tubing and maybe a pump unless your sources is higher than your house. Also costs money, and needs to be replaced eventually.

You need food. Most gardens are geared to fruits and veg, and you'll need a lot of space to grow enough to live on without supplementing from stores. Depending on where you are, you might be able to harvest some berries and fruit if you have producing bushes/trees on your land. Or you can plant them and wait until they are mature enough to produce. You will need to freeze, dry or can what you pick or it's gonna go bad before you can eat it all. So you need canning stuff (big pot, grabber tongs, hella mason jars, and those lids have to be replaced every couple years). A root cellar (lots of digging! So much!) will keep your root veggies and apples fresh through the winter if it's deep enough. Wash your cabbages and carrots in bleach water every now and then. You'll add a month to their viability. You'll want a dehydrator for sure. you can build a passive solar one, but we use an electric one as fall fruit in an outdoor space is a bear fun time pantry. You need garden tools. They cost money and need to be replaced periodically.

You still need protein. Say you live in a place where you can fish and hunt (in season). You need to pay for licenses for these things. You can trap smaller game, but that's much more challenging. If you are hunting larger game you will need a deep freezer to store (electricity!) or be content with a massive salting / smoking process that will allow you to store meat long term.

You also need carbs. Grains need a lot of land space, and the right climate. Getting them to an edible state means you'll need to thresh, winnow, and grind your wheat/oats/spelt etc. Grinding means you need a stone mill. A hand crank meat grinder isnt going to cut it (literally) but you'll want one anyway for other stuff. Potatoes are a good source, and are easy to grow in the right climate. These need to be stored in a cool dry place away from rodents and insects to last all year.

You need fats. Wild crafted diets are low in fat, which is not always a good thing. Game meat is low in fat, and you can't make cooking oil from it. Deer tallow will make soap and icky candles. You need bees for good candle wax (and honey!) Raising chickens can get you both fat and eggs. But they need a place to roost that keeps them safe from predators.

You'll need fencing to protect your garden from deer and bears. Without an electric fence, your garden and chickens are going to get eaten or trampled. Dogs help with this, as do shotguns.

So you need micro hydro (only if you have an accessible, appropriate water source that has enough flow rate) or solar (if you live in a place that gets enough sun all year round.

You need medicine. Our mainstays are tinctures and teas. A very small sampling: nettle, mint, mullein, poppy, willow bark, chamomile, chaga, lions mane, spruce tips, elecampane, milky oat, pearly everlasting, ghost pipe, pine pollen, raspberry leaf, and red clover.

If you really want to go all out, you need clothing and cleaning cloth, so you'll need to tan leather or weave flax or cotton. We have alpacas we shear for fiber. They are cute and less trouble than llamas, but won't haul anything, so sometimes we have to borrow a donkey if we're pulling things up a steep path. You'll need soap, so save your tallow.

I could go on. But really, this is a massive, MASSIVE effort for a single person. Without access to money or the outside world it is going to be a slog. But wow, if you're into it, go try it! I don't recommend you buy some remote property and cut yourself off from the world to see if you can hack it. One bad winter where you run through your firewood? One bad frost or dry summer that kills your crops? There's a reason people tend to settle together.

So yeah, you need good land, good water, good equipment, many years to get established, some friendly neighbors, and some way to get money when you need it. Or a bunch of people already doing this that like you and want your help.

Go look up a victorian household guide on Project Gutenberg. So many good ideas! They have instructions for making everything from soap to paint.

Good luck!

Dr. Grace Farris is chief of hospital medicine at Mount Sinai West in Manhattan. She also writes a monthly comics column in the Annals of Internal Medicine called "Dr Mom." You can find her on Instagram @coupdegracefarris . Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

On this edition of "Two Way Street," Georgia musician Adron stops by to talk and play a few songs from her new album "Water Music" before setting sail for the west coast. We also hear from a woman who made a career of saying goodbye: Kay Powell.

Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit NOEL KING, HOST: Good morning. I'm Noel King. Karan Singh (ph) has performed magic tricks for famous actors, athletes and politicians. Now he'll perform for you for free. All you have to do is ask. Like many artists under lockdown, Singh has traded in-person performances for online ones. So pick a card. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) KING: Visualize your card. Did I get it? KING: He's already done shows for over 400 households from his bedroom in New Delhi - the magic of the Internet. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

As per this AskMefi question, I've been selected to be part of a US West Coast spoken word & performance tour in March 2020 and I'm looking to extend that to other places in the US while I'm up there.

I'm in Australia. I've lived in the US before but in the West Coast, so I'd like some assistance in figuring out how to best plan my potential tour elsewhere in a cost-effective and time-effective way. Mainly I'd like some help with working out a route and base itinerary - I can work on organising bookings, but if you can assist with that that'd be great too.

Budget is highly limited but let's chat!

Dr. Grace Farris is chief of hospital medicine at Mount Sinai West in Manhattan. She also writes a monthly comics column in the Annals of Internal Medicine called "Dr Mom." You can find her on Instagram @coupdegracefarris . Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

The head of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said in a Friday briefing that after two days of investigating the two-month-old shooting death of Ahmaud Arbery there was “sufficient probable cause” to arrest two men on charges of aggravated assault and felony murder. And GBI Director Vic Reynolds didn't rule out more arrests in the future.

These five oldies but goodies from the On Second Thought archive cover topics from rocket science to recipe books. Check out these stories to start your week out with some good news. What are some of your favorite On Second Thought segments? Leave us a message on our Facebook group or our Twitter page . 1) “ From Ma Rainey To Otis Redding, The Musical Roots That Gave Georgia Its Sound ” Last September, we were joined by musical scholars, Joycelyn Wilson, Lance Ledbetter, and Jamie Weatherford to discuss the history of music in Georgia. From Outkast to James Brown, and from Brenda Lee to Jason Aldean, Georgia has produced some of the most respected minds in blues, country, soul, rock, and dozens of other genres. 2) “ Primatologist Frans De Waal Explores What Humans Can Learn From Animal Emotions ” April 2019 saw Atlanta-based author and primatologist Frans de Waal discuss his book Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions . His work explores how primates and other animals experience emotions

Billy Bragg is many things: a poet, punk rocker, folk musician, and singer-songwriter. He’s also an activist, music historian, and best-selling author. In the words of another poet, he contains multitudes. Bragg’s newest work, The Three Dimensions of Freedom , is a slim volume that makes a weighty argument. It’s a pamphlet in the tradition of Thomas Paine, whose influential polemics helped spark the American Revolution, and later got him convicted of sedition.

***This episode references guns and suicide and may be upsetting for some of our listeners*** Data can be a tricky thing to bring into discussions around guns and suicide. As Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke discuss in this episode of Two Guys on Your Head, being more critical about the way information is...

Listen back to our Views and Brews discussion recorded live at The Cactus Cafe in Austin, Texas as we ask What is Austin Music and Can it Feed Your Family?  KUT’s Rebecca McInroy along with Graham Reynolds, Redd Volkaert, Leslie Sisson, Thor Harris, and Brannen Temple to talk about collaborating across musical cultures; what it...

In the 1970s Monsanto unveiled a miracle herbicide–Glyphosate. The pitch: it was as safe as table salt for people, but could flatten even the peskiest weeds. Farmers and homeowners alike have used the product ever since. Now, it shows up in detectable levels in many foods, and almost every American has some in their bodies....

Thor Harris takes Elizabeth on a brief tour of progressive rock and gives a shout out to Yes and other stalwarts of the genre and describes what music inspired his new, hypnotic project, Thor And Friends. Then Grace London and Zoe Czarnecki from the Austin band Misimplicity describe how Elliot Smith and a bass concerto by Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf have helped them find their musical ways and climb musical mountains.

Matt the Electrician describes how seeing Michael Penn's video for "No Myth" changed his life and gave him the permission he needed to pursue a life in music

In this edition of In Perspective we teamed up with KUT’s Views and Brews for a discussion on various elements of and debates over Artificial Intelligence. What does it actually mean to think? How does understanding how computers work inform what we understand about the brain? And what is on the horizon for us in...

Across the country, rank-and-file prosecutors cringed at another extraordinary intervention by Attorney General William P. Barr.

Speaking to allies on a private call, the former president took a sharper line toward the Trump administration than he typically does in public.

Now, More Than Ever, Musicians Need Your Support. These are extraordinary times yet one thing is certain… music connects communities. Due to this pandemic, understandably, all live performances have been cancelled until further notice. Yet, it's these very performances that provide the musicians income...

Many up-and-coming filmmakers' dreams for success have been crushed indefinitely due to the COVID- 19 pandemic. As pointed out in Shirley Li's piece in The Atlantic entitled The Pandemic Is Hitting One Part of Hollywood Especially Hard, film festivals around the world—arguably the most important life-line for new filmmakers—have been cancelled....

Invoking rules that sometimes seem quaint as quill pens, the House and Senate certified President Bush's reelection despite a rare objection, which was intended to spotlight voting irregularities in Ohio and elsewhere.

Since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, many local plant nurseries say there’s been a run on seeds as people all over Seattle take to gardening to grow food and provide solace during an uncertain time.

You can store and trade Pokémon for free with this cloud-service app when it launches next month, but premium users get expanded capabilities.

NEW YORK (AP) — New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who has won bipartisan praise for rallying supplies for his ravaged hospitals and helping slow the coronavirus, is coming under increasing criticism for not bringing that same level of commitment to a problem that has so far stymied him: nursing homes. In part-lecture, part-cheerleading briefings that […]

Since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, many local plant nurseries say there’s been a run on seeds as people all over Seattle take to gardening to grow food and provide solace during an uncertain time.

NEW YORK (AP) — They are briny and sweet — once you get past those formidable spines. Biting into one has been likened to kissing a mermaid. Now they are ready for their close-up. Sea urchins — which contain the prized meat the Japanese call uni — are the subject of a new documentary “The […]

NEW YORK (AP) — They are briny and sweet — once you get past those formidable spines. Biting into one has been likened to kissing a mermaid. Now they are ready for their close-up. Sea urchins — which contain the prized meat the Japanese call uni — are the subject of a new documentary “The […]

In the unofficial forecast numbers, Washington would lose $3.8 billion in revenue this current budget cycle. An additional $3.27 billion would be sheared off the 2021-23 budget cycle.

Amid a national frenzy to buy medical supplies for use in the COVID-19 outbreak, Washington state suspended competitive bidding and recruited help from the private sector. Gov. Inslee connected personal contacts with state buyers.

Pacific Northwest Ballet, after canceling two programs and closing both branches of its school due to the coronavirus pandemic, stands to lose approximately $3 million through the end of April

Fans holding tickets for MLB games in 2020 could be notified as soon as Wednesday about options for exchanges or in some cases refunds, with specific ticket policies to be decided by individual teams.

Under normal circumstances, this would be a perfect time to sneak in a round or two (or four), but of course, that’s impossible. All courses in the state have been shut down by virtue of Gov. Inslee’s shelter-at-home order March 23.

Still facing a backlash over saying she wouldn't visit the White House if the United States wins the World Cup, soccer star Megan Rapinoe said Wednesday that she considers herself a proud American.

NORTH ATTLEBOROUGH, Mass. (AP) — A substitute teacher at a Massachusetts high school has been fired for smoking marijuana in class and leading a discussion about the drug, the school’s principal said. The teacher was fired Monday from North Attleborough High School after students reported the incident to officials, according to a statement from Principal […]

Eight of the cases have been confirmed in King County, four in Snohomish County, three in Spokane County and two in Kitsap County.

Like many other arts organization in the country, Seattle Symphony Orchestra (SSO) has instituted temporary layoffs, leaving a 58-person staff from its usual roster of 250 employees.

NEW YORK (AP) — New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who has won bipartisan praise for rallying supplies for his ravaged hospitals and helping slow the coronavirus, is coming under increasing criticism for not bringing that same level of commitment to a problem that has so far stymied him: nursing homes. In part-lecture, part-cheerleading briefings that […]

NEW YORK (AP) — New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who has won bipartisan praise for rallying supplies for his ravaged hospitals and helping slow the coronavirus, is coming under increasing criticism for not bringing that same level of commitment to a problem that has so far stymied him: nursing homes. In part-lecture, part-cheerleading briefings that […]

ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — SeaWorld guests could be sitting in every other row of the stadium to watch orca shows when the parks eventually reopen, the company’s CEO said Friday. Interim CEO Marc Swanson gave an update Friday on a coronavirus safety plan under development, but no official reopening dates have been announced, the Orlando […]

An emergency room physician has been fired after he publicly decried what he called a lack of protective measures against the novel coronavirus at PeaceHealth St. Joseph Medical Center. The hospital is the only emergency facility for some 250,000 people in the state’s northwest corner.

Under normal circumstances, this would be a perfect time to sneak in a round or two (or four), but of course, that’s impossible. All courses in the state have been shut down by virtue of Gov. Inslee’s shelter-at-home order March 23.

Business and government insiders say other companies and organizations are contemplating similarly extended time frames as they consider the new realities of the workplace in the COVID-19 era.

In the unofficial forecast numbers, Washington would lose $3.8 billion in revenue this current budget cycle. An additional $3.27 billion would be sheared off the 2021-23 budget cycle.

It is beyond time for the International Olympic Committee to come to the same conclusion that virtually every governing body, and an increasing number of athletes, have wrapped their brains around. Namely, that the Olympics must be postponed.

Under normal circumstances, this would be a perfect time to sneak in a round or two (or four), but of course, that’s impossible. All courses in the state have been shut down by virtue of Gov. Inslee’s shelter-at-home order March 23.

Plummeting passenger traffic and flight cancellations will cost Seattle-Tacoma International Airport an estimated $251 million by the end of 2020.

NEW YORK (AP) — New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who has won bipartisan praise for rallying supplies for his ravaged hospitals and helping slow the coronavirus, is coming under increasing criticism for not bringing that same level of commitment to a problem that has so far stymied him: nursing homes. In part-lecture, part-cheerleading briefings that […]