My photo stream is missing on my iPhone5. How can I get it back?

I recently restored my iPhone 5 to factory settings and have gone through the entire set up process. In my "Photos" I noticed there is no longer a "My Photo Stream" or any recent photos. I know have everything set up, the only outlier that I'm not familiar with is the new "iCloud Photo Library" on my MacBook Pro. I haven't turned that function on b/c I don't want to pay for 500GB of storage for my entire iPhoto library. Is that what could be causing the problem? If so, this is very frustrating. Is it possible to only have a portion of your iPhoto library uploaded to the cloud and not the entire library? Regardless, I want to see my recent photos back on my iPhone and recent photos on my laptop but neither are talking to each other.