  We summarise the main results of recent work on the Lyman break galaxy
population which takes advantage of newly commissioned instrumentation on the
VLT and Keck telescopes to push the detection of these objects to new
wavelengths and more sensitive limits. We focus in particular on near-infrared
observations targeted at detecting emission lines of [O II], [O III], and
H-beta and on the first tentative detection of Lyman continuum emission from
star forming galaxies at z = 3.
