Thanks. I reckon you did good!

Me!? Play with filters!? Never!

This was a five shot hand-held bracket set as far as the original shots taken. I played around with that using three of the shots and didn't like the results. So I took the 0 and +2 exposures and did a manual blend of those for this version. As you suggested there was some reflected light off the cactus which gave me the idea to exploit it, so yes definitely played with the sliders aggressively in Nik-Sfx. Did the same thing with the image next door. The light was flat so knew I'd end up going bw with these. I agree it does look unnatural, but it's just what happened and where things left off when I was too tired to push sliders any longer.

You seem to be able to control the distortion fairly readily. Have you played with filters here to turn the prickly pear white or is it just the reflected skylight?