This is a quick and dirty method for getting some textural/bump info from a series of photos by creating a rough representation of the normals. There is software out there ,such as crazybump, which do a fantastic job at creating normals from a photo. However, this method can give you a bit of a different feel, one that I found is a little more gritty and less game engine. Again, I usually just use the software, but sometimes feel the urge to make life a bit harder for myself by doing something like this.

The above picture is a representation of numeric 8 bit values in each channel of a normal map. You can see how the red channel represents the x direction, green y direction, and blue z. If you can create a lighting setup that would give you similar dynamic range on a grey matte sphere, then you could recreate these channels by shooting different plates, and then combining them as RGB channels for your normal image. NOTE: this only works with objects of uniform color and reflectance. You will see that the wood knots create a bit of a problem, but it works great with things like canvas cloth, clay of the same color, etc.

The above picture shows the plates used to compile my wood "photo normal". The beauty plate is shot with relatively flat lighting(Use a small aperture to keep a large depth of field).
Then shoot your top, side, and front lit plates. You may need to adjust your shutter speed to get a good range - you don't want too large an area dropping to black or blowing out. Then comes the photoshop trickery: desaturate each plate and adjust your levels so that your color picker reads the appropriate levels for surfaces facing camera or falling off to the x,y and z respectively. Copy and past your side plate into your red channel, top into green, and front into blue. There's your photo normal map - you can further adjust the channel levels in this file to tweak the map to your liking.