Photocatalytic carbon dioxide reduction transforms CO2 to useful chemicals and fuels, reducing CO2 emissions and making fossil fuels more renewable. Due to a lack of earthabundant sensitizers, we want to design new earth-abundant sensitizers to go with the many known carbon dioxide reduction catalysts. Zn(II) dipyrrin complexes strongly absorb visible light, but their excited state properties have not been widely studied. To investigate their photophysical properties, two Zn dipyrrin complexes, with and without heavy atoms, were synthesized and characterized by NMR and mass spectrometry. The photophysical properties of the two complexes were measured in polar and non-polar solvents, particularly fluorescence quantum yield and extinction coefficient. Also, through transient absorption spectroscopy, the triplet state quantum yield of both complexes was measures to determine the effect of solvent polarity and heavy atoms on the triplet state formation.