Nothing could stop 19-year-old Brittany Thomas from storming out of the conference room at the San Francisco Chronicle.

“It’s so hard for me to say goodbye! I can’t do it!” she announced dramatically when she was required to reduce her photo count.

But Thomas soon resumed her position next to Kathleen Hennessy, the Deputy Director of Photography at the San Francisco Chronicle, and they got back to work. Out of about 4,500 pictures from three days of shooting as part of the National Geographic San Francisco Photo Camp, only 80 photos would make the final cut in that night’s presentation.

“Editing is always very painful,” said Hennessy, who is also the coordinator of the San Francisco camp.

The camp is an extension of Vision Workshops, a photography mentoring program. The workshop gives inter-city teens the chance to learn techniques by meeting professional photographers and working with them at the camp.

“This program is filling a need that we’re seeing societally in our young people and enabling them to empower themselves through a tool—photography,” said Bert Fox, Picture Editor at National Geographic Magazine.

In 2003, Kirsten Elstner, President and Executive Director of Vision Workshops, teamed up with National Geographic to host the first camp in Washington D.C. Now in its third year, the camp has expanded to Washington D.C., New York, Miami, New Orleans, and San Francisco.

The professional photographers who mentored at this year’s San Francisco camp included Fox and Jay Dickman of National Geographic, and Hennessy, Jim Merithew, Carlos Gonzalez, and Justin Sullivan of the San Francisco Chronicle.

On June 19, nine at-risk Bay Area teenagers had their photographs presented in a slideshow to their parents, guests, and many of the newspaper’s top-level editors, designers, and photographers. Some of their work was also published in last Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle.

Fox said that many of the students from the San Francisco workshop were producing the best photos he had ever seen among those taken by students from the other cities where the camp was held this year.

Merithew, who is the magazine photo editor of the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, said that unlike last year, the kids made up a “very culturally diverse group.”

The photos shared the differences between two areas of San Francisco. Although within blocks of each other, the Tenderloin is an underserved neighborhood of the city, while Union Square is saturated with an endless array of shopping outlets.

“[The students] had such incredible courage to go into these areas and walk right up to people and talk to them,” said Hennessy, who is also the Deputy Director of Photography at the San Francisco Chronicle.

Students were recruited through Fostering Arts and First Exposures, both San Francisco-based community groups which mentor underprivileged kids. They were admitted based on an essay they wrote describing their neighborhoods.

Next year, Elstner would like to expand to two more cities, plus an international venue. As for San Francisco, Hennessy is exploring the possibility of mentoring a younger group of kids.

Brittany Thomas, one of this year’s participants in the camp, said, “It’s better to start early, indulging in something you love.” She said that the workshop has given her a bigger appreciation of the power of photography. “You never stop to think, but there’s a whole story to [people].”