Husband and wife wildlife photographers Doug Allan and Sue Flood work in the same field but often oceans apart

So Doug set out from McMurdo Station, the American Antarctic research centre, where the top wildlife cameraman was part-way through a two-month film-shoot for the BBC. He drove across Ross Island on a snowmobile to Cape Royds, where the hut erected by Sir Ernest Shackleton still survives, a century after his famous expedition.

Photographer and former TV producer Sue Flood, also a veteran of top-rated nature documentaries, flew in on a helicopter from where she'd been working for three months – on board a Russian ice-breaker. "We both went to work in the Antarctic for several months, but in completely different places, until 3 December," she says.

In this exotic icy rendezvous, she had landed with Alexandra Shackleton, the adventurer's granddaughter. "We flew back to the ship and (Doug and I] had a few hours together, though we were inundated by passengers," she recalls. "Most of the people there were keen to meet Doug, having seen him on TV," she says. "It was basically tea and cake with 100 people. So much for our romantic reunion…"

More than three decades ago the young Doug Allan, a native of Dunfermline and a marine biology student at Stirling University, developed a taste for diving, having been snorkelling on family holidays. "I felt (that] you couldn't study marine biology without getting into the water," he says, and so he started out searching the waters of the Tay and Spey rivers for freshwater Scottish pearls.

Now 57, he is one of Britain's top wildlife cameramen and a specialist in filming over and under water in extreme conditions in the Arctic and Antartic. Along with Sue, 43, who lives and works with him in Bristol, Allan is back in Scotland this week to give a public lecture on Friday at Edinburgh's Napier University.

It was on an early visit to the Antarctic – as a research diver – that Allan fell in with a film crew. That team included the great David Attenborough, and a career beckoned.

"I could never see myself working in an office," Allan says, "it always had to be something outside – with a punch of adrenalin to it. When I was helping out (this crew] I thought that there was a job in wildlife filming, an important one, that would encapsulate what I enjoyed.

"I was actually very useful: not many people had my combination of skills. There were a lot of good photographers, but when you put them in the Antarctic mostly they found it too cold to work. I knew there were some really spectacular things to be covered underwater, under the ice. That was when I saw a specialist niche."

Sue Flood left Durham University in 1986, with a degree in zoology, and joined the wildlife production company Survival Anglia soon afterwards. She then moved on to the BBC and spent 11 years working for their world-renowned Natural History Unit in Bristol, including a stint as an associate producer on the highly acclaimed TV series The Blue Planet. With a burgeoning interest in stills photography, she left in 2005 to focus on that, filing photographs for the likes of Getty Images. Her photography has taken her from the Arctic to Africa.

In July she'll be heading back to the North Pole, with a company called Quark Expeditions. They take adventurous clients on trips to the Pole on a 75,000 horsepower, nuclear-powered Russian ice-breaker. Flood has enlisted on this trip before – one which takes about 120 tourists to 90 degrees north – as a lecturer.

The couple met under relatively tame circumstances, at a wildlife conference in Bath, but the prospect of marriage was broached in a highly dramatic scenario. They had been filming together on The Blue Planet, camping out on sea ice in the High Arctic, and one morning woke to find themselves stranded on a drifting ice floe 100 feet across. Sue recalls fighting down her panic, as they signalled an emergency to a satellite, while Doug saw his moment and proposed.

"I thought I was going to die," he jokes. "I didn't want to get into the typical situation ten years hence, where wives ask their husband 'Can you take me back to where you proposed?'."

In fact, he was already preparing to pop the question, having just bought a house on the West Coast of Ireland, seeing it somewhere they would live together. "When we left to go to the Artic, I was thinking we would later go over to Ireland for the first time together, and then there would be a proposal. Drifting away on the ice, it occurred to me that this was even more special."

They never really got round to a honeymoon – "every day is a honeymoon" is Doug's mantra, says Sue – but after a couple of years they planned their first real holiday. "The sort of holiday you have when you are married to Doug – a Great White Shark diving holiday," says Sue, dryly.

"We left from San Diego and went to the Mexican islands of Guadelupe to film (them]. We just thought it would be a fun thing to do. When the shark comes and bites the cage a foot away from you, it wakes you up."

The excitement is set to continue. The couple have been in meetings with the BBC this week to discuss a new production. Doug has a passion for working with marine mammals, getting close to them in the water. "You can't beat that adrenaline buzz, when you establish a connection with a 50-tonne whale that you've somehow persuaded to spend time with you, or you've given it confidence so you can spend time with it."

His current ambition is to spend time in the Arctic with Bowhead whales, also known as the Greenland Right Whale, which may be the Earth's oldest living animal, thought to live for over two centuries, but seldom filmed.

The couple have no children. Doug's son from his previous marriage, Liam, is 14, mostly living in London with his mother. Dad's idea of father-son outings is predictably adventurous: snorkelling with manatees off the Florida coast, or filming with humpback whales in Tonga. The two are heading to the Red Sea shortly on a diving trip. After their four-hour Antarctic reunion last December, Doug and Sue didn't see each other for another three months, until just a couple of weeks ago, but that length of gap is exceptional.

"We work together a bit, we work apart a bit," Sue says. "If I was sitting at home twiddling my thumbs," she reasons, "I'd go mad. We are destined to have these ridiculous meetings and encounters."

Last August and September, the couple worked together in Uganda, filming gorillas and chimpanzees for a private client. They ended up at the Chimpanzee Sanctuary at Ngamba Island – a 100-acre haven for animals from the bush-meat and pet trade – volunteering their time to make a short film there. Flood says that, for her, the Polar regions are "absolutely spectacular scenery, wilderness, the thrill of seeing the world's largest predator, with you on foot only a few metres away". She has singled out the fate of the polar bear, its hunting cycles and habitat threatened by thawing ice, as a particularly dire warning of the impact of global warming. Doug recently revised Antarctic areas that he worked in as far back as 1976. "I have seen with my own eyes the retreat of several glaciers and the change in species, in penguin types, that you now see," he says.

They don't deny that the wild life brings its own brand of stress. "There are times when it's difficult," he admits. "At the core of it, we are two independent people, both very passionate. If we were together all the time, that wouldn't work; if we were apart all the time that wouldn't do either. But if we share an experience – a high – together on the ice, it's a bigger high than you would get if you were just seeing it on your own."

In Bristol, they live next door to the city Zoo, from where they can hear the lions roaring at night. "I went there last month with my godchildren and they have a penguin exhibition – so I felt right at home," she says.

There's a moment in the Planet Earth Diaries, which show how the series was made, when David Attenborough describes a bear being drawn by the smell of Doug's home-cooking. "It's not an experience I have had in 13 years," Sue laughs.

Freeze Frame: Life Behind the Lens is at Edinburgh Napier University, on Friday (5.45pm).

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