Recovering photos from iphone 3gs in recovery mode??

I installed some updates including for facebook to my iphone 3gs from the app store. When I tried to access facebook, it wouldn't open properly, so I switched my phone off to see if that would help and since then it seems to be stuck in recovery mode. When turning it on the apple logo comes up but then the screen goes black. I've tried holding the power and home buttons down together and also plugging the charger in, but the same happens. Stupidly, I have never synced my phone to itunes and now when I plug it in, I can get itunes to recognise the phone by holding the home and power buttons together and it recognises that there's an iphone in recovery mode connected, but it wants me to restore the iphone to it's original settings.

My 1st question is will this wipe all my photos from my iphone? and secondly if it does, is there a way of accessing the photos to save them elsewhere as I have a lot of precious photos/videos on there and no backup copies of them? I really don't want to lose them all!!