>>12562342Thanks! I don't grow anything, the tardigrade is from a piece of moss that I just got from outside. I let it soak in water for a few hours, squeeze out the water into a petri dish and look at it under low magnification to see if there's e.g. tardigrades. I then suck them into a pipette if I do see them, drop onto a glass side, put on a cover slip and then look at higher magnifications. Alternatively you can just take a drop of water at random and put that onto a slide, but finding tardigrades that way takes a bit of luck though they are pretty common. There's probably quite a lot of life in that drop regardless, for example rotifers are very common and quite cool. Here's a video of a rotifer catching food that I took when I was very new to this and kept the aperture size at near minimum, enhancing contrast but reducing resolution.
Beyond that, going to your local pond and scooping some water along with a bit of dirt from the bottom into a jar will probably yield quite a few creatures to look at. You can end up with creatures you can see by eye like water fleas, copepods and amphipods that reveal a lot more detail under a microscope.
In case anyone cares I've shot these videos with my phone camera mounted on a cheap tripod. This kind of works but isn't ideal, especially since my phone camera is decent but nothing to write home about.
