My iphone 4 went into recovery mode?

As bad as this sounds, my life revolves around this phone. I have two jobs, one where I'm a manager and I need to be in contact with my employees and the other is for photographers and during one of our weddings I was setting up a shot with my camera, i exited the app, pressed the hold/wake button on the top of the phone and put it in my pocket. Moments later, without hurting the phone at all, I noticed the phone wouldn't turn on at all. I remembered leaving the house around nine thirty with 100% battery life and it was around noon. There was no way the phone should have died without warning me. When I went home afterwards I hopped on my PC, plugged it in to charge the phone (just to see if the battery failed) and nothing happened. I uninstalled and reinstalled the newest version of iTunes. (this phone wasn't currently hooked up to it) and an error pops up saying my phone was unrecognized and in recovery mode and for iTunes to recognize it, it needed to be reset. After much thought, I resolved to reset and recover any lost information. However when I went to reset through iTunes, it then said (after five minutes of going through the entire process) that it couldn't be reset. I'm not comfortable downloading anything besides apple approved stuff due to problems in the past. Please any assistance would be greatly appreciated… Thanks for the time

Just hold down the top button and the one on the front at the same time. Mine did this once, went to AT&T just for the guy to do that, made me feel stupid lol