I'd like to have in my custom hompage a slider with pohtos and the latest written news article complete and with images. Is there any function that does this?

Of course. Use this to get the latest articles:
http://www.zenphoto.org/documentation/plugins/zenpage/_zp-extensions---zenpage---zenpage-functions.php.html#functiongetNewsArticles

Then create a object using the object model (see the tutorial).