Using a blind can be a VERY important part of better nature photography. Using one can help you get your shots of things from Elk to Frogs. I use the word blind here in a very loose sense. I'm not meaning that you have to go out tomorrow and buy the latest and greatest blind. One of the best "blinds" to have, I suspect you already own....your car. Many animals pay less attention to you while you are in your car than they do if you are walking. Some common sense has to be used here as in when you can safely just stop your car in the road and also where you can park it and wait for your subject to arrive.
Many of us have some form of wildlife we can photograph from our house. Deer, birds at the feeders or a Wild Turkey that likes your yard. Some tricks here are of course, if at all possible, don't shoot through the window glass. If you must, you must but try to avoid it. Using a standard window that opens vertically as an example, raise the bottom window all the way up. Cover both actual windows with the curtain, a blanket,cardboard or whatever you can use. Now cover all of the open part of the window except for about 3 to 6 inches from the bottom of the now fully raised window.
I have a large piece of cardboard cut just for this but many other things would do as well. If using cloth of some sort for covering the window opening, those expandable curtain rods work well for this since they are adjustable and easily removable. Fancy is not important here. A towel with an end wrapped around a cheap expandable curtain rod and held on the rod with binder clips could do the trick. Whatever you use, the goal is to give you room to see and photograph through clearly, but reduce the area that the birds,deer or whatever else can see you and your movement. It also helps to keep this room as dark as possible while you're using it as a blind. Yes, you will scare away any birds at the feeder as you set up your blind. But they will soon come back and when they do, you will be able to move around to get your shots without them seeing you.
Another "blind" to use is anything that might already be there that you could use to breakup the outline of your body. The shot above was taken a few years ago. I noticed that the migrating Yellow-rumped Warblers liked to perch in this one tree. First try, I photographed some from my car. There was a place to pull off the road fairly close and the road is more like a driveway, so no problems there. I got some shots, but of course, I wanted to get closer. There was a piece of equipment/machinery, something on the order of the size of 2 heat pumps sitting halfway between me and the birds. I already had some shots, the best I was going to get without getting closer, so I took my camera over and sat down on the ground and the end of the equipment. It didn't hide me, but since I was sitting on the ground it did a fair job of disguising me or breaking up my outline.
I sat for a few minutes and here came more birds. They landed right in the tree as if I wasn't there and I happily shot away, now a lot closer to my subject.
Of course there is a huge variety of ready made hunting blinds available for almost whatever your needs may be. Using any of these ideas will increase your chances of getting shots you want and also increase the quality of the shots since you can now be a lot closer to the subject. A little bit of forethought and patience might not get you the equal of a what that new 600mm lens would every time, but it will in a lot of instances and its several thousand dollars cheaper.
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