If they are important photos you or your friend might try a data recovery product but will have to buy it as they tend to be commercial products (or the good ones do, anyway).
One example (not used this myself):
Image Recall
If they are really really important photos there are companies who specialise in retrieving the data for you but they'd be likely to charge around £100 (on the bright side, many of them operate a no data recovered, no fee policy).