This might be old news to some of you, but after trawling through some blogs/wikis/et al, I couldn't find a decent method to configure SWTOR's camera such that its maximum distance could be increased. Then I stumbled upon this post.
Short version:
Edit: C:\Users\<your username>\AppData\Local\SWTOR\swtor\settings\<account name>_Account.ini
Edit or add the configuration option:
Controls_CameraMaxDistance = <value>
By default, this appears to be set to 25.0. 50 seems to be a bit far (35-40 are probably perfect), but the precise distance will depend on your own personal preferences. The number may be recorded as a float, but if you use a whole integer, SWTOR will still read it correctly. This value appears to be changed when you click OK/apply from the UI preferences, and you should be warned: If you attempt to change this within the UI preferences, the value will be reset to 25 or less.
Note: This will affect the scaling for the camera zoom speed, so the higher this value is, the farther your camera will zoom in or out with each zoom tick. I haven't found a fix for that yet.