If you can boot with a recovery disk, then the Laptop is OK. That suggests that the old Hard Drive is no longer viable. That means a new drive is needed to make the laptop functional.
A local shop may be able to recover the pictures on the old drive, or they may not. But you need to put a price tag on how much those pictures are worth to you.
You may be able to boot to an OS residing on a USB or Optical Disk Drive and attempt to access the data on the drive. (A recovery disk is not enough) This is not a simple thing.
But if the drive really is dead, there will be nothing that you can do with it at home.
Here is a Tom's article that falls under the category of "worst case scenario." It could cost between $3,000 to $20,000 (US Dollars) to forensicly retrieve the data. (http
/www.tomshardware.com/picturestory/642-data-recovery-hard-drive-failure.html)
If you do recover the pictures, make sure you store copies in at least two separate places.