With the creation of the laser in the 1960s, optics research gained a whole new type of coherent, well-behaved light with which to experiment. Later, similar matter was created; first in the form of super-fluids and then Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs). A BEC as a whole behaves in many ways analogous to a monochromatic laser beam; the ultra-cold atoms in a BEC are the matter equivalent of photons in the laser beam. Researchers have built the BEC analogs of a number of optical components, including lenses and beam splitters. The work described in this thesis was inspired by the aim to investigate theoretically BEC analogs of effects known from laser physics and by developing a BEC analog of Fourier holography. After introductions into lasers and BECs (chapter 1) and numerical methods for solving the differential equations governing the behaviour of both light and BECs (chapter 2), this thesis comes in two parts. The first part is concerned with the BEC analogs of the formation of transverse laser modes (chapter 3) and an interferometer for sorting optical vortices (chapter 5), and a non-destructive method of Fourier-transforming a BEC (chapter 4).The second part is about optical holography and optical tweezers. It starts with a review of hologram-design algorithms (chapter 6). Originally inspired by optical Fourier holography, discussions about BEC Fourier holography counter-inspired a new algorithm for optical Fourier holography, namely a Gerchberg-Saxton algorithm for 3-dimensional light shaping (chapter 7). My work on the improvement of hologram-calculation software for optical tweezers is described in chapter 8.