Why did my photos not come back after an icloud restore?

I'm a little terrified right now… I have an iPhone 5 and messed something up on my phone and wanted to do a backup RESTORE, and the best backup available was one that the phone automatically saved last night around midnight on the icloud. So I erased all my data (following multiple tutorials online, you apparently have to do this for an icloud backup) and after the phone deleted all content, it kind of rebooted, and asked me if I would like to restore from a backup. I said yes and selected the one from iCloud, from last night. As planned.

Well I was happy to see my phone looked like its regular self again. My apps were all getting downloaded, it restored my background, my settings, my notes, but then when I looked at my photos it was all EMPTY. Not a single photo or video. Which is strange because it is displaying a background photo that I had in my camera roll which is now empty.

Worst case scenario, I will restore again from an older backup that I made on my computer instead of restoring from icloud, but that backup was done about a month ago. I will lose a lot of new information so I really don't want to do that.

Is there a way to get my photos back? Does the icloud even backup photos? Or, if there's a way to restore photos only from the month-old computer backup without losing new notes and what not, please let me know.

ICloud doesn't back up photos, but it saves them in your Photo Stream. Your camera roll should come back after you restore from a local backup on your computer. If you sync again with iCloud after restoring, then, your notes, calendars, reminders, etc. Should come back.