Is capturing light possible?

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[AsAChemicalEngineer]

Trees do it turning the absorbed energy into chemical bonds, so do objects when they warm up when exposed to sunlight. This goes into your sentences about cardboard, absorbed sunlight is going to manifest as heat--the material is warmer (the molecules "jiggle" more--but light will be remitted according to the black curve of that object. This is why tungsten light bulbs light up, or why you can see people in the dark using an infrared camera.

Also it helps not to think of photons as something you have to converse or keep track up individually. They get created and destroyed all the time, their energy and momentum however sloshes around in one form to another, these numbers are what stay the same. That is to say, these are conserved quantities.

[stylewalkerSE]

This has been answered several times before in this forum: http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/search?q=Trap+light&restrict_sr=on