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Fckm.
Well, as you said, a photon is a quanta of EM energy. When light interacts with matter, photons certainly can lose a portion of their energy.
Plank's equation E = H * nu only tells you how much energy a certain frequency (nu) has - nothing about conservation of energy. Light hits an object, the frequency of reflected light is slightly lower than the incident light. The question is asked, why?
As you dilligently mention, an atom will fully adsorb the photon and re-emit the photon with a lower frequency (and hence less energy). This means that the atom which emits the new photon does so with greater energy (in terms of the atom) and the photon which is emitted has less energy. Conservation of energy is observed - that is until you consider quantum mechanics (which we rightfully should). The question then is what can we measure?
I didn't want to over complicate my initial response (as I often do) and as such did not explain the adsorption and emission of photons to save time and effort. Only someone with some degree of background in chemistry or physics (such as in your case) would be able to follow such a conversation anyways.
What I find more intriguing though is that all moving objects exhibit a wave-like motion. This was derived by Schrodinger and is known as the Schrodinger wave equation:
lamda (wavelength) = h (Planck's constant) / m (mass) * v (velocity)
So anybody on this board could calculate the theoretical wavelength of themselves walking. All you need to know aside from your velocity and mass is Planck's constant h = 6.626e-34 kg m^2 s^-1
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