We continue today with chapter 26. Many forms. One correction. It is not difficult to understand the reasons why you do not ask the Holy Spirit to solve all problems for you. He has not greater difficulty in resolving some than others. Every problem is the same to him because each one is solved in just the same respect and through the same approach. The aspects that need solving do not change whatever form the problem seems to take. A problem can appear in many forms and it will do so while the problem lasts. It serves no purpose to attempt to solve it in a special form. It will recur and then recur again and yet again until it has been answered for all time and will not rise again in any form. And only then are you released from it. The Holy Spirit offers you release from every problem that you think you have. They are the same to him because each one, regardless of the form it seems to take, is a demand that someone suffer loss and make a sacrifice that you might gain. And when the situation is worked out so no one loses is the problem gone because it was an error in perception that now has been corrected. One mistake is not more difficult for him to bring to truth than is another. For there is but one mistake, the whole idea that loss is possible and could result in gain for anyone. If this were true then God would be unfair, sin would be possible, attack be justified and vengeance fair. This one mistake in any form has one correction. There is no loss. To think there is is a mistake. You have no problems though you think you have. And yet you could not think so if you saw them vanish one by one without regard to size, complexity or place in time or any attribute which you perceive that makes each one seem different from the rest. Think not the limits you impose on what you see can limit God in any way. The miracle of justice can correct all errors. Every problem is an error. It does injustice to the Son of God and therefore is not true. The Holy Spirit does not evaluate injustices as great or small or more or less. They have no properties to him. There are mistakes from which the Son of God is suffering but needlessly. And so he takes the thorns and nails away. He does not pause to judge whether the hurt be large or little. He makes but one judgment that to hurt God's Son must be unfair and therefore is not so. You who believe it is safe to give but some mistakes to be corrected while you keep the others to yourself. Remember this. Justice is total. There is no such thing as partial justice. If the Son of God is guilty then is he condemned and he deserves no mercy from God of justice. But ask not God to punish him because you find him guilty and would have him die. God offers you the means to see his innocence. Would it be fair to punish him because you will not look at what is there to see? Each time you keep a problem for yourself to solve or judge that it is one that has no resolution, you have made it great and passed the hope of healing. You deny the miracle of justice can be fair. If God is just then can there be no problems that justice cannot solve? But you believe that some injustices are fair and good and necessary to preserve yourself. It is these problems that you think are great and cannot be resolved. For there are those you want to suffer loss and no one whom you wish to be preserved from sacrifice entirely. Consider once again your special function. One has given you to see in him his perfect sinlessness and you will ask no sacrifice of him because you could not will he suffer loss. The miracle of justice you call forth will rest on you as surely as on him. Nor will the Holy Spirit be content until it is received by everyone. For what you give to him is everyone's and by your giving it. Can he ensure that everyone receives it equally? Think then how great your own release will be when you are willing to receive correction for all your problems. You will not keep one for pain in any form you will not want. And you will see each little hurt resolved before the Holy Spirit's gentle sight. For all of them are little in his sight and worth no more than just a tiny sigh before they disappear to be forever undone and unremembered. What seemed once to be a special problem, a mistake without a remedy or an affliction without a cure has been transformed into a universal blessing. Sacrifice is gone and in its place the love of God can be remembered and will shine away all memory of sacrifice and loss. God cannot be remembered until justice is loved instead of feared. He cannot be unjust to anyone or anything because he knows that everything that is belongs to him and will forever be as he created it. Nothing he loves but must be sinless and beyond attack. Your special function opens wide the door beyond which is the memory of his love kept perfectly intact and undefiled. And all you need to do is but to wish that heaven be given you instead of hell And every bolt and barrier that seems to hold the door securely barred and locked will merely fall away and disappear. For it is not your father's will that you should offer or receive less than he gave when he created you in perfect love. And from the workbook, Review Lessons 181-200, Introduction With this review we take but one idea each day and practice it as often as is possible. Besides the time you give morning and evening which should not be less than 15 minutes and the hourly remembrances you make throughout the day, use the idea as often as you can between them. Each of these ideas alone would be sufficient for salvation if it were learned truly. Each would be enough to give release to you into the world from every form of bondage and invite the memory of God to come again. With this in mind we start our practicing in which we carefully review the thoughts the Holy Spirit has bestowed on us in our last 20 lessons. Each contains the whole curriculum if understood, practiced, accepted and applied to all the seeming happenings throughout the day. One is enough but from that one there must be no exceptions made and so we need to use them all and let them blend as one as each contributes to the whole we learn. These practice sessions like our last review are centered around a central theme with which we start and end each lesson. It is this, I am not a body, I am free, for I am still as God created me. The day begins and ends with this. We repeat it every time the hour strikes or we remember, in between we have a function that transcends the world we see. Beyond this and a repetition of the special thought we practice for the day, no form of exercise is urged except a deep relinquishment of everything that clutters up the mind and makes it deaf to reason, sanity and simple truth. We will attempt to get beyond all words and special forms of practicing for this review. For we attempt this time to reach a quicken pace along a shorter path to the serenity and peace of God. We merely close our eyes and then forget all that we thought we knew and understood. For thus this freedom given us from all we did not know and failed to understand. There is but one exception to this lack of structuring. Permit no idle thought to go unchallenged. If you notice one, deny its hold and hasten to assure your mind that this is not what it would have. Then gently let the thought which you denied be given up, ensure and quick exchange for the idea we practice for the day. When you are tempted, hasten to proclaim your freedom from temptation as you say, this thought I do not want. I choose instead, I am not a body, I am free, I am still as God created me. Repeating the idea for the day, let it take the place of what you thought. Beyond such special applications of each day's idea, we will add but a few formal expressions or specific thoughts to aid in practicing. Instead we give these times of quiet to the teacher who instructs in quiet speaks of peace and gives our thoughts whatever meaning they may have. To him I offer this review for you. I place you in his charge and let him teach you what to do and say and think. Each time you learn to turn to him, he will not fail to be available to you. Each time you call to him to help you. Let us offer him the whole review we now begin and let us also not forget to whom it has been given as we practice day by day advancing toward the goal he set for us, allowing him to teach us how to go and trusting him completely for the way each practice period can best become a loving gift of freedom to the world. Lesson 201. I am not a body. I am free. For I am still as God created me. I trust my brothers who are one with me. No one but is my brother. I am blessed with oneness, with the universe and God, my Father, one creator of the whole that is myself, forever one. One with me. I am not a body. I am free. For I am still as God created me. Amen.


What can be more classic than a covered bridge? And what would be more appropriate to photograph that covered bridge than a wooden-filled camera? In this episode of Ride in the Edge, I'm back in another covered bridge for ongoing Covered Bridges of Oregon project. And while I'm out here, let's talk about the basics of metering. Let's get them along for the ride. My name is David Patton. When I started photography, I wanted to make art. I wanted to be a landscape photographer. But with a family to feed and bills to pay, I decided it would be better to be a working photographer than a starving artist. So I took a job as a photojournalist. 25 years and thousands of assignments later, it was time to go back to my first love. It was time to follow my passion. Come along on my journey to become the best black-in-white photographer I can be. Whether it be film or digital, I will be sharing what I learned through my successes and my failures and hopes to inspire and educate. This is my journey. This is Ride in the Edge. Now I'm too slow. I'm at Hoffman Bridge near South Oregon, trying to get a picture. I took one off the side. I wanted to take one from the center. It's kind of a redundant shot. It's shots from the center. I mean, it's really the... There's only a few shots you can get of Covered Bridges and I think I've done that so much. I was gonna try to set a shot here, but there's just too much traffic. Doing it with a large format camera is probably kind of silly. But I might still try. Problem is the light's changing. It's changing every 30 seconds. So I'll take a reading and then boom, light changes. I can see it changing. My first exposure I made with a yellow filter and I compensated an extra stop for that. And I'm trying to make a second shot on this bridge. And I'm gonna give it a couple more tries and I'm gonna do one without a yellow filter just because I need to work a little faster and sticking a yellow filter on there. It's probably not in the cards for the time it takes to do it, so. Got off another frame. Didn't do any critical focus, but depth of field is shooting pretty small aperture so I should get plenty depth of field. So while I'm out here, I thought I would talk a little bit about metering for your photos. I don't talk a lot about metering because most people shoot digital nowadays. And with digital it's just, I mean really, you're seeing what you're getting on the back of the camera. You've got histograms. The skill of metering the light is not as useful as it used to be unless you shoot film like I do. I don't think there's any mystery about using light meters. It's really pretty basic, at least the way I do it. So I'm gonna talk a little bit about it, just the basics, what I'm using, what I do. Now let me insert a disclaimer here while I'm setting up a shot at a different bridge. This next segment on metering is just my opinion based on my experience. I am no way trying to tell you this is the only way to do it. This is just how I do it. And these are the conclusions I've come to through my experiences. As you probably noticed, I use an incident meter. I actually recently heard a fairly well-known photographer say that these are only good for the studio. This is baloney, it's hogwash. I've been using one of these for years.  You've got to twist yourself up all kinds of ways to find that perfect exposure. It's just not that complicated. It's pretty simple really. Let me tell you what you need to know. We'll just call this the basics of metering. Now there's two kinds of light meters, an incident meter and a reflected meter. The incident meter measures the light falling on the scene and a reflected meter measures the reflected light from your subject or the scene. Now I actually think the incident meter is more accurate, but honestly I could use either one. I carry an extra camera body with a spot meter in it and sometimes I'll use the spot meter if I need to. The really the achilles heel to this kind of meter is you need to be in the same light as your subject. Probably 80 to 90% of the time that's the way it is. I'm usually in the light of my subject. There are times where I may be shooting something far away and I might want to meter the light that was reflecting on that off the subject. So I might reach for a spot meter for that. But if I was only allowed to use this, I'd have no problems with it. I would much rather measure the light falling on the scene than trying to interpret the light reflecting off the scene. If you don't know, a reflected meter always tries to give a middle gray or also known as 18% gray reading, a tonal value. So in other words, if you point at a white wall, it's going to turn that white wall gray. If you point it at something black on the other end of it, it will turn that gray. So it'll either under overexposed. So the trick is when you're in nature trying to... Not so fast, David. Don't forget to say to get your whites white, you'll need to open up a couple stops and to make your blacks black, you'll have to close down a couple stops. Okay, carry on. So the trick is when you're in nature trying to anticipate what is the tonal value that I'm putting my meter on. Often grass will be a pretty good thing to meter off or maybe some rocks that have a 18% gray, middle tone gray value. I recently watched a video of a landscape photographer talking about how he made a bunch of readings on the scene and then after he did all that, to check his readings, he used the incident meter and went into the, where he was shooting and took the reading to make sure that his initial reading was correct. What makes me laugh is why not just do that in the first place? I think a lot of photographers have in their heads that they have to do a spot meter or it's not going to be accurate.  So I used to meter off my hand if I didn't have a gray card and I then opened up a stop or a three, four, some stop. I can't remember exactly what it was. And that was kind of my gray card that I would carry around. I just meter off that and then take the picture.  I've seen photographers take gray cards and put them in the scene and take a spot meter reading off of it. And I was like, well, if we're going to do, go to all the trouble doing that, why not just take an incident meter reading it's much quicker, it's just as accurate and it saves you a lot of time. If you don't own an incident meter, I'm not saying go out and buy one because that's on the way to meter. I'm just saying, if you've been told the incident meters are only for the studio, you've been misled.  So if you can't find something that's middle tone, you'll have to interpret what tone you're pointing your meter at. That blue right there, in most cases, that's going to be pretty close to middle gray. So there'll be a lot of times when I'm shooting slide film that I would meter off the dark blue in the sky and that was pretty close to the correct exposure. With slide film, you want to be right on, man. There's no room for error.  There's a lot of latitude there. If you've got a light meter that's got both incident and reflective, don't disregard that incident meter because it's going to give you an accurate reading if you're in the same light as your subject. But even a gray card, if you tilt it just a certain way, it's going to give you too much shine. It's going to give you a little bit off reading. And you can say the same thing for an incident meter. I tend to point my meter globe towards the camera and that seems to work pretty well for me. It's another reason to settle on a few films and really get to know them because you can kind of interpret what you're going to get from your readings if you're constantly going from film to film and not really understanding how much contrast you're going to have, how much latitude this film is going to give you. It gets hard to dial in the sweet spot for the films. These cover bridges are kind of one of my personal projects. They're one of my kind of passion projects. So when I finally got some decent light, I thought, well, it'd be a good day to get some images. And then some of these bridges I've shot with older digital cameras. And I think I can do better with my film cameras. So I'm revisiting a lot of the places I've actually shot before. Well, I think I'm going to end the video right here. I don't anticipate this being a long video. It's just good to get out and work on a couple personal projects. So until next time, thanks for coming along for the ride. As we take one last look at the images I made in this video, I want to leave you with this one thought.  Whether it be a spot meter or incident meter, practice is what it takes to get consistent exposures for your images. So get out there and make something good. Have fun doing it.