In producing my photo tour of Cork I was quite fortunate that my laptop was fitted with software which assisted me in achieving my end. Having traversed around the city taking photos of historic sites (of which there are a considerable number) I loaded these pictures which I had taken with my digital camera onto my laptop hard-drive. From there It was my intention to go about modifying them, as we were told in Digital History that there was software on the internet which could assist us in doing this and we had seen it in action in one of the classes. However, it just so happened that very shortly after my photos were loaded up onto the hard-drive I discovered that the laptop had Microsoft Office Picture Manager.
I discovered that the picture manager had sufficient services available for me to achieve my end: I was able to rotate and crop, as well as alter the colour and contrast of my photos. The first of these options (rotation) I didn’t both using as it didn’t serve my purposes. However, the latter three I did. Form the picture comparisons displayed in this blog, the extent to which this particular piece of software enabled me to improve the quality of the images I had initially photographed is self-evident, and I think has no need for me in this blog to clarify which image is the photo before undergoing “improvement” using the picture manager.
After increasing the quality of the images there was the task of incorporating them into some kind of digitally presentable historic tour. Again, I initially resorted to seeking some kind of software on the web which would facilitate this purpose of mine. Yet, again I discovered there to be at my disposal software already applied to my laptop whereby I could do this: Windows Movie Maker. There were a number of tasks that needed to be carried out in the process of producing the tour, and I went about inserting the pictures into the video bar 
first in the order of subjects I wished to talk about. From this I had a base upon which I could structure the narrative which would correspond to the images.
From experience of having given speeches roughly 10 minutes in length, and also intending for the duration of this tour to last approximately 10 minutes, I thought it best to type up and print out what I had to say because I knew I couldn’t sustain a coherent narrative for that length of time without a visual aid to assist me. So, as I read out what I intended to say, with the Movie Maker set to record me, I spoke into a small hole just above the screen of my laptop with a symbol for a microphone upon it. When I played back what it had picked up, though I what I had said wasn’t perfectly clear, it was sufficiently understandable. Perhaps if my mouth had been closer to the hole, my words when played back to me may have been more distinguishable.
A less serious matter was that of making the appearance of the photos, on the main video screen, correspond to the section of the narrative which discussed the history relevant to them.
This issue was quickly addressed by my being able to extend and diminish the duration of the narrative for which the various pictures appeared on the main screen by dragging them back and forth within the Video Bar. Thus, having done all this and saved it, my Video Tour was finally complete.
As for the things about which I actually spoke, they were primarily religious subjects. In discussing St. Finbarre’s Cathedral I referred to its history going back to the Protestant Settlement of Ireland during which English and Scottish settlers came and with them brought their reformed versions of Christianity. In particular I focussed on the pulpit of the Cathedral and discussed how Protestant Churches tend to have a greater diversity among their congregations. 
Specifically, the pulpit of the Church is more heavily decorated than that of St. Peter and Paul’s. 
This led onto a summary of the differentiation between High and Low Church Anglicans before moving onto the Celtic Cross erected in memory of those from Ireland who fought and died in the Anglo-Boer War. With this particular historic feature I gave attention to those names inscribed upon the base of the Cross, and indicated that the vast majority of those listed would have been members of the Protestant Ascendency/Anglo-Irish aristocracy of the country, with very few (if any) being of indigenous or Catholic heritage.
To the extent that Beamish Stout too was linked to the Protestant heritage of the country (Beamish being a Protestant name) I thought it appropriate to take a slight detour on the route and include the Beamish and Crawford factor on the tour.
More than likely I wouldn’t have bothered to do so only for the fact that at the time I had been taking my pictures in the city I knew that Heineken was soon to take over control of the brewery, and that famous logo of the local Cork Stout would no longer be seen on the brewery’s distillation tank.
Following this slight detour about the brewery I returned to discussing history of a purely religious nature which included the Huguenot community in Ireland and the Presentation Order in Cork before finally moving onto St. Peter’s Church and the Franciscans’ history in the city. For this final part of the tour I was fortunate to have focussed during the final year of my primary degree on the Franciscans in producing an 8,000 word thesis on this particular religious order. Thus, I was well furnished with things to say.
