FMP - research - archive sources - part 3

I kept on looking for old images in social media - mainly because it is really convenient to scroll down on your phone in public transport. That is how I came across some amazing colorised images of Old Sofia. What drew me to the page was this image:

This is an amazing image of the St. Alexander Nevski church in Sofia, one of the landmarks of the city and to-date the biggest Christian Orthodox church on the Balkan peninsula. Today, its gold-plated domes can be seen from virtually any part of the city. But I have never seen a picture of the place under construction. Until I saw this and definitely thought that I need to have it in my project. That is how I discovered the Royal Bulgaria in Colour project. 

The Royal Bulgaria in colour website

They have dedicated some time in colorising images from the period 1878-1944 and most of the images are really mesmerizing to look at. We often forget that while photography was black and white back then, life was still full of colour and fun. What the project does is to collect old images from individuals or libraries, scan them and then colour them in Photoshop. They even published an album with some of the best images from the project - arranged by theme and decade. An amazing book, I have a copy of it and I can say it is something that is necessary to every Bulgarian house (take a look at it, here). 

For months, I've delved in the archives of this project since the images were absolutely amazing. However, as great as the images were and even though the time frame was just what I needed, I couldn't use many of the images. Because, as with the previous two archives, here the stress was on people and events and very rarely on architecture. 

At that point of research, I felt helpless - I didn't even have the required number of images to start with and what I had was actually not good for re-photography (the angles or framing did not match and the images were too few). So I started a random search on the Internet and rediscovered an old blog I used to read - the Old Sofia project that has been going for more than 8 years. They post interesting content about Sofia each week, there is even a game 'guess where this photo is taken and what it is on it' on their Facebook page. The activity of the project is very, very regular and the content they post is usually referenced. There are amazing stories to read and most importantly for me - a ton of architectural images. 

The home page of the blog with the latest post

I spent the better part of several weeks scrolling through the myriad of posts on the blog (since each post is accompanied by a few images) and started selecting the places that I needed to rephotograph (more about that in a follow-up post.