Light-in-flight recording and relativity

Summary form only. Einsteins special theory of relativity has turned out to be extremely useful and has successfully passed all tests. However, some of its statements are difficult to visualize. The Lorentz contraction, for instance, is it real or just apparent and caused by the method of observation? When I started to use "light-in-flight recording by holography" it became clear to me that picosecond light pulses do not appear in their "true" shape. Thus, a plane wavefront appears parabolic and a spherical wavefront appears ellipsoidal. These observations inspired me to study relativity from a new point of view and the result became a graphic method to visualize special relativity.