Q: I needed to reset my phone and retreive my info thru iitunes but i did not get my recent pics.  Is there a way to find the lost pics?

Only i you have a backup from the time before you lost the photos to restore from. Pictures taken with the camera are part of the backup.

If you don't have that backup anymore, your pictures are gone.

And, you can only restore the whole backup data, not only parts of it.

how do you access the backup? my phone wont activate after restoring to factory settings at all

@hannahdarley

Try to connect in recovery mode to restore, explained in this article:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1808