Brian Zwit - Instructor

Brian has a wide variety of interests including photography, nature, computers, hiking, and backpacking. His interest in photography began 35 years ago when he picked up his first Nikon in high school and he has been an avid photographer and enthusiast ever since. So, given his interests, it was only natural that his passion—some would say obsession—in the age of digital imaging would become nature photography.

He travels the United States looking for wildlife and the perfect landscape, getting up very early to capture the “magic” light of sunrise. Brian also backpacks into the less visited areas of some of the most beautiful areas in the country to get an image that the roadside visitor can’t see. In the past few years, he has traveled to Alaska to photograph coastal brown bears, California to make images of the dry, dramatic landscape of the deserts, and Florida to capture images of wintering birds.

Brian’s images are on display in homes and offices around the region and some have appeared in regional magazines, including Wonderful West Virginia. Corporate clients have used his images for promotional and internal publications. Brian also blogs for  DCPhotoGuide to  and will be launching his own blog on nature, photography, and nature photography in Fall 2008.

Brian uses Nikon cameras and equipment almost exclusively. His preferred camera is a full-frame Nikon D700 but also uses a Nikon D2x and a Nikon D300 as backup cameras and for some technical and artistic purposes. Brian also uses Holga and Lomographic cameras and a Zero Image Zero 69 pinhole camera whenever he get tired of scrolling through menus on his digital cameras.

About a year ago, Brian purchased a Mac Pro quad-core desktop computer and quickly fell in love with the Mac operating system, replacing his laptop two months later with a MacBook Pro. He primarily uses Nikon Capture NX2, Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop, and various plug-ins for both programs to process his images but, depending on what he wants to get out of a photograph, will use DXO Optics Pro, Bracketeer, HDR qtpfsgui, Hugin, LightZone, and Photomatix Pro. To create multi-media content and web pages, he uses Adobe Dreamweaver, Flash, and Illustrator, Apple Final Cut and Logic Pro, Apple Keynote, and Boinx FotoMagico.

Brian has college degrees in chemical engineering, law, and photography and extensive training in HTML, PHP, JavaScript, and other computer technologies and applications. In his day job, he is an attorney for a major Internet company.