WINTER WILDLIFE PHOTOGRAPHY

Doug Allan is a Canon pro and award-winning wildlife photographer and film-maker who regularly shoots breathtaking footage for BBC nature programmes with David Attenborough, including The Blue Planet, Planet Earth, and Frozen Planet. One of the headline speakers at The Photography Show Virtual Festival in September, we caught up with Doug to talk about how he got started as a photographer and film-maker, the transition from stills to film, the Canon equipment he selects for assignments, and how he overcomes the extreme conditions he faces while in the coldest and most challenging places on earth.

How did you make the move from being a diver to a wildlife photographer?

I was 24 when I first went to Signy Research Station (Signy is a small island in the South Orkneys, at the head of the Weddell Sea in Antarctica), and I’d describe the eight years down south that followed as my formative years. Working as a diver, my job was to make sure that the scientists and the biologists got their jobs done safely. And I was also encouraged to train anyone on the base who wanted to learn to dive.

For me at that time, it was near perfect. I learned a lot about cold-water diving, as well as how to manage in the cold topside. l learned my limits; the difference between feeling chilly, approaching hypothermia, and being frostbitten. It gave me a feeling for snow and ice that I took on to my filming career.

I became interested in photography while in the Antarctic, starting with only stills. I wanted to photograph not just the wildlife, but also cover the whole story about how the base operated – so I learned how to take the kinds of photographs that would tell those stories. It was almost like training to be a photojournalist, rather