My iPhone 4S won't turn on past the apple logo?

Basically, my phone kept freezing so I decided to do a hard reset, which I thought restarts the phone. But now it's stuck at the apple logo and has been like this for almost an hour. My phone has full battery. I don't know what to do! I don't wanna have to restore my phone, because my photos aren't backed up yet.
Any help will be very much appreciated!

If you've done a hard reset as you said, then it's already too late - a hard reset wipes the phones memory as if it was a new phone, so all your stuff will be gone, sorry. The best thing to do is to just send the phone into apple, there must be a hardware problem, possibly with the processor. Hope this helps