Our eyes are amazing devices. They can see a huge range of brightnes(dynamic range) at a given time, and are quite sensitive in low light. The computer behind them(our brains) plays a huge role in how we perceive something we see, and also the emotions it invokes.
Cameras, on the other hand, are sterile devices. They capture what is before them, nothing more and nothing less. Many cameras do have baked in biases, whether it is in the way the film emulsion is set up or in the filter array over the sensor or spectral sensitivity of photosites, etc. None the less, they capture the "true" color of the scene, only a certain amount of DR, and all the like.
When I look at a photo I've taken, I want to take myself back to being there.
Out of necessity, I must edit photos. I want to feel what I saw when I was looking at the scene. I want it to be a faithul reproduction of what my eyes saw.
Sometimes that takes some even more complicated tricks like masking and adjusting the exposure in a certain area, or yes maybe I remove something that I just didn't see there(the latter is unusual).
Still, though, I will not show an unedited photo.
BTW, dirty little secret-all digital photos are edited. If you shoot JPEGs on your CaNikOnyFilmUs camera, you are relying on a team of folks over in Japan to make your photos look the way you think they should look.
If I take a RAW photo and pull it into Lightroom, I have complete control over how that RAW file(which is just the 1s and 0s of sensor data) is shown as a final image. Yes, often I start with an in-camera interpretation(since Lightroom defaults generally to rendering things like the white balance and saturation set in-camera) but that's really only a suggestion or a starting point for me to do what I want. Sometimes it gets a small tweak, and sometimes the end result looks nothing at all like that.
