<p>We consider trajectories of massless particles in the presence of charged black holes in asymptotically AdS spacetimes in arbitrary dimensions. We study the properties of the photon ring in the (near-)extremal limit and show that the photon ring can probe the near-horizon region in two different scenarios: in high enough number of spacetime dimensions or when the massless particle carries an electric charge. We propose a simple i<i>ϵ</i>-prescription for implementing the JWKB approximation and show its utility in various contexts. We calculate the quasi-normal modes for charged fields in the eikonal limit and show the emergence of a new time-scale of relaxation in the dual field theory side. In the near-extremal limit, we show generally that the time-scale of decay of the perturbations is governed by the chemical potential. We also verify our analytical results numerically. The i<i>ϵ</i>-prescription allows us to study the superradiant modes and the associated instabilities in the eikonal limit easily. We comment on some related aspects regarding near-extremal black holes.</p>