I was on the top floor of the Sainsbury’s car park in Kings Heath a few days before Christmas. A planned walk home had been scuttled by the discovery of some possibly perfect frames in Poundland and I was waiting for Fiona to finish her doings so I could cadge a lift. The sun was setting and the trees were looking nice against the horizon so I got to work. Moments after this photo was taken disaster struck.

I slipped on the slushy ice and let go of my TTV contraption. The box itself was fine – it’ll take more than a fall to break one of those beasties – but the top camera, my trusty if occasionally flaky Fuji S7000, went skittering along the concrete making that clacking noise that electronics make telling you they ain’t coming back from this one.

Thankfully I was able to get the images off the card but the lens barrel was shattered. I wouldn’t be using this camera again and, because the contraption was built specifically for it, I probably won’t be using that either. After a little over three years my old friend was gone.

Still, it wasn’t the end of the world. The S7000 was a good camera but it wasn’t great and the charm of the roughness and compression artifacts was fading for me. I was wanting more control over my images, particularly in post-processing, and that meant shooting in RAW through a decent lens. I’d been playing with some with some new contraptions to go with my Nikon D70s but there was never the impetus to finish one. Now there was. And here it is.

It’s not much to look at. The main thing is to get the length right and see how the Nikon behaves with it. Once I’ve got a handle on that I’ll start looking at ways to strengthen the body and attach an attachment to attach the Nikon on via the tripod mount. But for now I’m just getting used to how the Nikon focuses and metres through the Duaflex.

The day after building it I took it down the river path for a test drive. Here’s some of the photos I took. It was a very sunny day so I was able to test a full range of apertures confirming a suspicion that area in focus decreases as the apertures widens. So if you want a crisp edge to the square (as I tend to do) you need to be at around f5.6 or smaller. Fine on a sunny day, probably not so fine in a dark room. That said, this was never a problem with my old contraption as the camera fit so snugly into the tube that it worked like a monopod. Once I fit the Nikon to the new contraption I should have the same effect.

The difference between the old and new was so dramatic I got a little worried for a while, thinking I’d lost that grimy DIY feel and was hurtling towards the curse of the “perfect” digital photo. Suddenly there was detail and clarity in my TTV. It just felt… wrong.

But of course it wasn’t wrong, just different. And having been out a couple of times I’m growing to like it a lot.