mplot3d

I’m learning how to use mplot3d to produce nice plots of 3d data and I’m pretty happy so far. What I am trying to do at the moment is a little animation of a rotating surface. For that purpose, I need to set a camera position for the 3D projection. I guess this must be possible since a surface can be rotated using the mouse when using matplotlib interactively. But how can I do this from a script?
I found a lot of transforms in mpl_toolkits.mplot3d.proj3d but I could not find out how to use these for my purpose and I didn’t find any example for what I’m trying to do.

I am trying to plot a 3D image of the seafloor from the data of a sonar run over a 500m by 40m portion of the seafloor. I am using matplotlib/mplot3d with Axes3D and I want to be able to change the aspect ratio of the axes so that the x & y axis are to scale. An example script with generated data rather than the real data is:

I’m doing some 3D surface plots using Matplotlib in Python and have noticed an annoying phenomenon. Depending on how I set the viewpoint (camera location), the vertical (z) axis moves between the left and right side. Here are two examples: Example 1, Axis left, Example 2, Axis right. The first example has ax.view_init(25,-135) while the second has ax.view_init(25,-45).