Say you walk in to a room that you’re going to photograph for editorial, architecture, food. Whatever. The light sucks. Plain and simple, you need to add flash but you need the ambient for fill or maybe you can’t turn it off. Matching the colour of your flash to the ambient can be a pain. Especially, if you have no idea what the colour is!

Both Nikon and Canon do a very good job of the custom white balance, based on the ambient environment. If you are shooting available light, you just shoot a white (or grey) card and set a new white balance to match your mystery ambient light. With a little in-camera calculation, the camera manufacturers out there (Nikon, Canon, Sony, Pentax, Fuji, etc.) can correct to any CC-pack (colour correct) out there. You do your white balance, it tells you what colour gel to put on your flashes and you have a colour balanced flash! Wouldn’t that be nice?

Alright, here’s the tricky part. Nikon, (or Canon, Sony, etc.) you already have the ambient offset color information available in the camera, and it works great. How about you just give us a menu option to know how to CC our flashes so we can match the ambient without buying an expensive flash color meter?

Now all that has to happen is we have to get the companies listening. So if you like the idea (I do, and I know David Hobby does) go out and re-post this blog or strobist.com, or tweet it, facebook, delicious, digg, reddit, or any thing else you can think of. Let’s see if we can get someone to see us.