The photographs were created at great expense: skill, equipment, time, props. Of course copyright applies.

"Great expense" isn't enough in all jurisdictions. In a sweat-of-the-brow jurisdiction like the UK it would be, but I'm not necessarily convinced that it would be in the US.

"I bought a really kickass camera; all my photos are now copyright" vs "I used my phone's camera; I don't have copyright on all my images" seems like a rather ludicrous difference too. Because things like time are hard to measure and irrelevant ("I waited outside all day for sunset" vs "I lucked out and got there at the perfect time to take it"), and props, when it's literally -one- object, being taken from the most obvious angle, also seems a bizarre thing to consider. Not saying what is or is not the law, and in what jurisdictions, just that it seems weird to consider it anywhere.

If you think of it in terms of expense and recompense it makes sense. I spent £5k making this photo vs. it cost me nothing beyond sunk costs to make.

The first thing that comes to my mind is Duchamp's Fountain...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp)

Seriously. Given the amount of modifications you can make to such a common object, they changed a fair bit. Altered the lighting all over the place, faded some of the indentations, copied over the pattern to make the tape wider than it normally would be to better fit a DVD case, etc. Yeah, it looks like it started from this guy's image, but they made a lot of modifications to it. The object isn't original, the angle isn't original, yes, it started with their image, but they modified it heavily (including in ways he doesn't call out)...without explicitly looking for similarities, I wouldn't have thought it the same image at all.