Here is what I like to do: I am not good at actual body morphs, i.e. taking a picture of a female bodybuilder and making her muscles bigger. Fortunately, there are enough good morphs out there that I have a ready supply of pictures which I can work on. Now I realize this may seem like I am stepping on someone else's toes, ripping off their work or whatever. I prefer to think of it as helping. Now some morphers may not want my help, and that is fine. If they tell me to take a picture down I will.

The truth is, this morphing business seems to be all about trying to stay out of trouble, or, if you're like me, seeing what you can get away with. I hear there is at least one morpher, Jack Eggs, who is pretty upset about people stealing his work and re-posting it and what-not. I know enough to realize that a LOT of work goes into a good morph, so I can't fault anyone for letting stuff bother them. But let's be realistic: even if you are an artistic genius, what you are really doing here is creating images whose main purpose is for titillation. Lighten up!

In my view, those of us who do the morphs and those of us who merely appreciate them are a very small community, a tiny subset of the "art world" and I would hope that we could stick together and have some mutual cooperation and provide support for one another. It seems to me that as long as you are willing to acknowledge the work of another artist, give him credit and point out what you have done to change his picture, then he should be willing to let you alone. Especially if you have created something that is quite new. Perhaps it is a vain hope! We shall see.

So like I said, I enjoy taking pictures that someone else has created and swapping out the heads, changing details of the picture such as attire, backgrounds, etc., and often, yes, making the muscles bigger. I know I said I am not good at doing that, but sometimes I can do minor "tweaks" with a passable result. I do not use photoshop--maybe someday I will--so there are limits to what I can accomplish.

And sometimes, as with arthurwatkins' brilliant Buffy face morph, I can fix things up a bit. That picture was great but there were some minor defects which needed work. I liked the picture enough to take on the challenge, and if you do a side-by-side comparison I think you will agree that I "helped". Anyway, I suspect that a lot depends on whether or not the original morpher actually likes what you have done to his picture! (And, for the record, arthurwatkins even acknowledges that HE was not the original morpher of this particular picture. So what kind of a "gray area" are we in here?)