We have shown that the mechanism for a reversible anisotropic photoselection of bacteriorhodopsin (BR) molecules and a very small saturation intensity of a BR film allow for the blocking of any intensity feature from an image by just varying the intensity of a He-Ne laser beam without conventional frequency filters or rotation of an analyzer. It is found that the E204Q variant of BR offers additional valuable features. The photochemical cycle with a red-light absorbing O intermediate, BMOB, and a distortion of the grating profile due to the low-saturation absorption are responsible for a large initial peak sharpness of the dynamic holographic recording kinetics.