Here is the high-tech equipment that I’m using to photograph my plankton. The center of attention is two microscope slides sealed together with a 3mm gap betwixt.
You wouldn’t think that depth of field would be an issue with a 3mm photo studio, but my auto-focus camera keeps grabbing the front slide, or the paper behind the slide, as areas of interest and yanking the subjects out of focus. Today I crammed some bits of moss in between the slides thinking that my newly-benthic photo model would want to perch on the moss. It didn’t, but the presence of the moss gave the camera something non-transparent to focus on in the right field of view… so, look for tiny green sprigs in my future shots. (That might also give some sense of scale which I’ve been missing heretofore.)
Thinking about teeny tiny photo shoots inspired me to run a google image search for “Flea Circus,” revealing the fact that there is a thriving flea-circus-equipment business in the UK which sells tiny stages, chariots, trapezes, etc. Look it up if you don’t believe me.