The photographer absolutely owns the rights to these images by default unless waiving them contractually and will win handily when you reproduce them without said rights.
So I looked into this more and again is not universally true.
The modern trend seems to be to follow the US law on this which is what you say but many signatories of the Berne convention in fact haven't changed their copyright law and commisioned works, specifically photographs, automatically belong to the commissioner in many jurisdictions.
Check your local laws.
I'm not going to go into much more but privacy protection laws likely apply here as well so that even if the photographer still owns the copyright they may not be able to make use of it since it contains your likeness,once again check your local laws.
I'm also reasonably sure it would be pretty hotly contested in an actual legal battle who owns the copyright to such works. There is most certianly prior cases regarding unfair license terms being removed or amended in contracts pertaining to copyright and this seems like one of those cases.
I standby my statement that the photographer is being shady and is assuming you won't take them to court over this.
The same applied to the us before and I would absolutely argue what I said is in the spirit of the law.
Also Hackernews has audiences from all over the globe.
Regarding the initial point I made. Even if the commenter didn't own the copyright, they absolutely would have an implicit license to have their father paint a picture of the photograph and wouldn't have needed to see the photographers permission.
Also every legal system looks at international laws to determine how a law is to be interpreted. There's a ton that goes into anything so take it all with a grain of salt but I'd be very very confident that should the photographer even have tried to claim damages or gotten any recourse legally in this instance they wouldn't have any legal footing to stand on.
Copyright on commisioned works is pretty clear and I'm pretty sure you would have to explicitly sign over your rights in that case.
I think its more a matter of the photographer not knowing the law or knowing you are unlikely to take then to court regarding it.