I think photographers should edit photos to reflect what the subject felt like, not what the subject looked like.
Whenever I take a cool weekend trip somewhere and bring my DSLR camera, I mentally block off the two or three evenings after I get home because I know I'll have a crap ton of photos to sort through and edit. Taking a few days' worth of RAW files and adding the right level of contrast, saturation, highlights and shadows, white balance...it takes time to get a batch of photos looking presentable.
I mostly shoot landscapes, and I think especially when shooting anything in nature there's a pressure to capture the subject as accurately and authentically as possible without significantly altering the coloration or the lighting or anything. The Instagram Age has given us all a sort of skepticism when we see a photo filter on anything, as if we immediately assume the person is hiding something. If I were to take a photo of the Grand Canyon and put a filter on it, a lot of people would understandably say, "Why would you ever throw a filter on something as intrinsically beautiful as the Grand Canyon?"
In other words, I think a lot of people expect photographers, especially nature photographers, to be answering the question, "What exactly did this thing look like?"
I think this is the wrong approach though. Maybe this is more a problem with my goldfishian long-term memory than it is with the art of photography itself, but by the time I return home from a trip and sit down at my computer to begin editing photos, I have almost entirely forgotten what those places looked like. I don't remember how red the color of the Grand Canyon was. I don't remember how blue the sky was. I don't remember how dark the shadows casted by the trees actually were on the rock. I don't remember nearly enough details to take a RAW file and develop it to precisely match something I saw three days ago.
What I don't forget, however, is how something felt. The way something feels sticks with you a lot longer than the way something looks, in my experience. Sure, I might not remember exactly how red the Grand Canyon was, but I remember what it felt like to look out over the rim of it and see it stretch for miles in front of me, and there's a red that feels like that. I think photographers should absolutely feel empowered to make these sorts of artistic changes to color and lighting and contrast and whatnot however they see fit. Obviously, there's a limit; we've all seen a photographer or Instagram user overcook a photo with so many effects that it just looks like a lifeless corpse of the photo that used to be there. But I think in a lot of cases it's these deviations from reality that can actually showcase a shot's identity.
In other words, I think a lot of people should start expecting photographers, especially nature photographers, to be answering the question, "What exactly did this site make you feel like?" And photographers should be able to alter whatever they need to on the shot to capture that feeling correctly.
You might not be capturing the Grand Canyon as accurately, but you're capturing what it felt like to be there more accurately, and is that not more important in the end?
Comments