Unless it is written into the contract, the photographer will retain all the rights. He wants to keep the rights to be able to SELL that image to the client at the huge markup and keep those profits.
We sell aerial photographs. All of them taken from aircraft, and all of them are just pictures of the ground. We retain the copyright and each photo is copyrighted right on the print. We will sell a low resolution image for the client to use on their web site, or for in house publication, or make 8.5x11 prints or use it in any presentation. They don't have the rights to reprint the large prints, and certainly we don't want them copying the photo and making poor quality copies with our name on it.
We will sell a copyright release to a client for a limited and specif use. It us $2,5000 and up for the release. We want to control the quality of any reprints. We have provided clients of images and they make some horrible quality prints.
Often the images we produce are too big fo most clients. The project I am working on right now is not large area yet the image is 4.1 GB. Clients try to open that in Word or PowerPoint and it crashes for some reason.
