Scotty's Castle - The main house

[E B]

as seen from the side view. The main house consists of two long parallel buildings. The building on the left contained the Johnsons' (owner) bedroom suite, a guest suite and a small music room. It also contained Scotty's (whom the home is known by) bedroom, dining room and kitchen and the house living room or hall as they called it. The building to the right (the Annex) connected to the house by an open bridge on the upper floor and contains several more guest rooms and the Upper Music Room which houses a large Welte-Mignon theater organ complete with its 1,121 pipes and some accompanying instruments. The clock tower, seen in my earlier image, contains a set of 25 chimes which were programmed to play automatically on the quarter-hour. Keyboards and roll-player consoles were also located in the house in several locations and allowed for other music to be played. In the foreground you can see a well. It was functional but more decorative than useful since the house had piped in water and actually used a small water wheel to power a DC electrical generator that provided electrical power to the complex. The two buildings of the main house are connected on both sides by gates (seen directly ahead) that ensured the large patio between the two structures remained quiet and private.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v197/TMAUR/Spring%202006%20Death%20Valley/Small/P5090210.jpg (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v197/TMAUR/Spring%202006%20Death%20Valley/Big/P5090210.jpg)

Camera: E-330
Lens: DZ 14-54mm at 14mm
Shooting mode: P
Shutter speed: 1/250
Aperture: f6.7
ISO: 100
Metering mode: ESP

[Hokuto]

Yep, that's pretty much how I remember it. I started to say something about that pipe organ, but couldn't remember for sure if it was there or at Will Roger's ranch in Santa Monica. I also recall there were large garages at Scotty's Castle for celebrity automobiles. Must've had some great parties there.

[E B]

You have a good memory. Yes, there was a automobile garage with underground gas tanks, a cookhouse for the staff, a separate power house for electrical generation, stable, bunkhouse and staff quarters, separate solar water heater installation, and a separate guesthouse. Additionally, they had an installation for what they called "Rock Gas" which appears to be on the order of butane and was used for fuel also.

As a sideline on the processing of the image, note that it was RAW developed using Bibble. The sun was very bright and the shadows under the various overhangs were extremely dark and couldn't be penetrated using Olympus Studio. Bibble gives at least one more EV in dynamic range than Studio so I used Bibble to process this image rather than sandwiching multiple exposures to extend the dynamic range so the shadows could be penetrated.