If the purpose of the photograph is to document a fact, to record it as truthfully as possible, then any manipulation which deceives the viewer would be problematic. That could be adding things to it, or leaving important things out.

You leave things out through the simple act of aiming the lens — or by taking the shot at a particular time of day. Landscape guy here, and it’s all about the light, which often is a time-of-day thing.

I prefer to show things exactly as I saw them. Sometimes that takes post processing. …aaand this is starting to shade into the raw format vs jpeg ooc culture war. Suffice it to say that exposure techniques differ between the two formats and it’s dead easy to process a set of raw shots into jpgs exactly as your camera would produce — plus you get an extra stop of dynamic range out of your camera. I don’t bother with jpgs.