Martin Castellan - Pure France

Martin was born a francophile - his name comes from Provence. Then came childhood in rural Staffordshire where foreigners were people from Birmingham. None of them were French

Reading David Attenborough’s “Zoo Quest to Guiana” at age 10, leech-infested jungles looked like fun. Life as a documentary film maker beckoned.

Martin spent every spare moment of his teens working on non-commercial documentaries and graduated in photojournalism and documentary film from what is now the University of Derby.

At last something French in this story - his final year film was shown at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival, but...

...in 1970s Britain, film and TV were union closed shops where newcomers could only start as trainees. Arriving at an interview as a graduate with an armful of films already made, one fresh from Cannes, convinced the BBC that he was overqualified. Rivals ITV said the same thing. In a two-horse industry, his career was stillborn at the age 23.

Retraining into information technology took Martin by coincidence to Michelin and then to another French company, Bull. He collected Open University degrees in computing and multimedia along the way.

Successfully catching the Internet bandwagon in 1989, he spent the 1990s consulting to banks, telecoms operators and the European Commission.

With more and more holidays spent in the Languedoc, France gradually became home and the UK somewhere else. The permanent move to Aude came in 1997 when Martin started an e-business consulting company near Toulouse.

He took British social network, Friends Reunited, into France, Italy, Spain, Australia & New Zealand. He extracted the Internet bank, Egg, from a loss-making French adventure, transferring its online business to French bank, Banque Accord.

There were consulting assignments for the European Central Bank, IBM, AT&T, British Telecom, Orange, SFR and...Pure France.

In 2002 came two British ex-pats, Hugh Atkins and Dan Jones, who talked of starting an online holiday rental company. This was a regulated profession in France and an administrative minefield. They needed help complying with the serpentine labyrinth that is French bureaucracy.

The Internet has transformed the media. A combined background in photojournalism and online technologies has become just the ticket.

As a journalist, he holds British and international press cards as well as a French photographer's carte professionnelle. His work has appeared in BBC Online, Culture Magazine, the Guardian, Libération, National Geographic, the Telegraph and Wanderlust. He's a contributor to Alamy, Getty Images and National Geographic Image Collection.

As an avid mountaineer in the Pyrenees, fascinated by the natural world, articles on French life are his forte.