We have developed a modular rheo-optical apparatus to study the flow properties of liquid crystals. Its main components are shearing device, strong magnetic field, and optical microscope. We performed experiments on well defined initial morphologies with uniform molecular alignment. The monodomains were achieved with strong magnetic fields (4.7 T). Time-resolved conoscopy is the primary optical technique in our investigation. We propose a simple relation between the distribution of alignment angles over the sample thickness and the conoscopically measured angle, to quantitatively measure the alignment angle in shear flow. We followed the relaxation of a shear-induced splay deformation in small molecule model systems (N-(p-methoxybenzylidene)-p-butylaniline (MBBA), pentyl-cyano-biphenyl (5 CB) and a commercially available mixture OMI4244). We define a rotational director diffusivity D(R) = K(s)/eta(s) (K(s) splay elastic constant, eta(s) splay viscosity) from the relaxation process and devised a model, based on the diffusion equation to determine their values. The director alignment behavior of the small molecule liquid crystals (SMLC＇s) in shear flow is well described by the two-dimensional Leslie-Ericksen model. The effect of director elasticity can clearly be seen in our experiments, resulting in a decrease of the steady state alignment angle at smaller Ericksen numbers. We found that there is no strain rate dependence of the director vorticity from 0.002/s to 2/s for poly-(gamma-benzyl-D/L-glutamate) (PBG). We determined alpha2/alpha3 = -44 for a 20% solution of 280 000 molecular weight PBG in m-cresol at 20-degrees-C. The conoscopic interference pattern vanished after 8 strain units from an initially planar alignment and shearing could be reversed up to 10 strain units to completely recover the initial monodomain.