It is now beginning to be appreciated that it is not only intellectually stimulating, but also technologically fruitful to apply tools and techniques from quantum optics and quantum information science to problems in classical optics.  The key observation is that the electric field vector of classical optics can be treated analogously to a multi-partite quantum state. The power of this approach is that quantum concepts can then directly inform and enhance classical optics tasks.  Along these lines we are devising quantum inspired approaches to circumvent resolution limits in conventional spatial and temporal imaging, to provide new insights into multi-degree of freedom optical interferometry, to realize information efficient object detection and to help clarify how coherence can be shared amongst an optical beams different degrees of freedom.