I do! Me Too!

Tags

dogs, engagement, morven park, pablo neruda, Poetry

In a previous post, I declared My Baby Sister is Engaged. This time, however, they wanted some photographs with their beloved dogs in Morven Park near Leesburg, Virginia, which is also the location of their wedding in September.

For you history buffs, before becoming a National Register Historic Property, Morven Park was the home of Virginia Govenor Westmoreland Davis. The 1,200-plus acre park has three museums, a mansion, a multifaceted equestrian center, and historic gardens.

The weather was beautiful, and their friends came along to help watch the dogs since we wanted photographs with and without the dogs. Along with some of the photographs, I want to share another of my favorite Pablo Neruda poems:

Pablo Neruda’s Love Sonnet II (translation by Terence Clarke)

My love, how many ways to get to a kiss,
what errant loneliness to get to you?
On go the solitary trains, where they roll with the rain.
In Taltal there’s no dawn, even of spring.

But you and I, my love, are one
from top to toe,
together in autumn, in water, hips to hips,
until just you alone, just me, together alone.

To think what it took for this Boroa river to take
so many stones to its mouth;
to think that, separated by nations and trains,

you and I needed only to love one another,
with all the confounded ones, women and men,
with the earth that seeds and teaches these carnations.

For the photography geeks like me, I shot these with my Canon 60D and 85mm prime lens equipped with a circular polarizer (CPL) filter. The majority of the shots were with f/5.6 to f/8. For some of them, I added a diffuser or glow filter for a subtle, dreamy effect using Nik Software’s Color Efex Pro 4.