Ok the thing to do for you if you want nice negs is to use the sone system. You mesure and expose for the shadows and develop for the highlights. Really fast told it means we have 10 sones varing from black (sone 1) until (sone 10) -white. If you get yourself a greycard (you can buy it in a descent photostore). Or as I used to do use youre hand. Then U mesure the light in the shadow and in the sun and se how many sones it differs. Lets say it differs 7 sones and you want to se youre shadows without everything fading away in the sunpart your greycard is sone 5. then 5 + 7. Ok its a long time since i did this basicly what i meen is mesure for the shadows -like you do now. But underdevelope maybee -1 or even -2 steps.